I was born in Florida–and so being back here is familiar to certain cells of mine, cells that agree that moss is supposed to hang from trees, and that grass blades are meant to be nearly one inch thick, and the air is supposed to be heavy with moisture.

In the same way that the air is familiar, it also feels familiar to be sitting beside my mother. I’ve lived away from her for years now, and it feels perfectly real and natural to be sitting on a chair, looking at the curve of her cheek and the way her blond hair lies in bangs across her forehead, and the way she purses her lips because she has false teeth that were installed in her when she was just 23 years old when an unscrupulous dentist pulled all her teeth out. 

It is one of the main stories of her life–along with the story of Marcus, the boy from her high school that she always thought she would marry, only he played with firecrackers and went blind and had his right arm blown off. And the story of how she then went on to meet my father, who had just gotten his first job away from his home in Charleston, and when he went to a boarding house to apply to live there, my mother was the tenant who opened the door–and she had coral-colored toenails, and he had never seen toenails like that, and so they got married two months later, and I was born eleven months after that.

These are just some of the stories that were cornerstones of my childhood, stories she told and acted out and dramatized and analyzed over and over again, and I never tired of hearing them, even though the lessons and morals of the stories changed. The firecracker story, for instance, went from being a story about why one should NEVER EVER go near fireworks to being a story about how you shouldn’t forsake your true love just because he lost his eyesight and his hand. And the story about meeting my father went from being a delightful mother-to-daughter story about How I Met Your Father to being a cautionary tale about how men who haven’t seen coral toenails before are probably too innocent to be let loose on the world, and how in fact, my father was still in love with his plain-colored toenails girlfriend back home, and even though he married my mother, he pined for someone else–and so their marriage ended in divorce 13 years later. (Lesson: pay attention if the guy keeps mentioning an old girlfriend before you invest in the wedding dress.)

But now there are no stories being told. I arrived in Florida on Tuesday, after having talked to my mother on the phone on Saturday…and was shocked to discover that she is, to use the technical, medical term, out of it. She is, in other words, in the end stages of cancer, all this one month after being diagnosed with colon and liver cancer.

Last week she asked me on the phone, “How is it going to happen that I’m going from being the lively person you now hear speaking to you to being a dead person? I do not know how that is going to happen!”

I didn’t either.

But now, seven days later, she cannot speak or see. She won’t eat or drink water. She mostly lies unresponsive, except that she squeezes my hand as I sit beside her. Every now and then a fleeting smile crosses her face, a smile that’s almost like a newborn’s.

I am stunned by this. How could we be here so soon? One day last week she dictated her obituary to me, told me how to spell the name of her high school, reminded me of what year she graduated, said she wanted to be cremated, and told me where the ashes were to be sprinkled. She had made arrangements for her dog, Bear, to live with her neighbors, and she told me to take her jewelry and her flatware and her Bose radio. The rest, she said, she didn’t care what happened to it. Sell it, give it away, burn it…whatever.

And then she went silent. 

When I came down here, I thought we were just having one of a series of visits before The End, that we would sit and talk and visit. I pictured driving her to the ocean, so she could once more see a sunset. I thought perhaps we would go out to lunch. Lobster bisque sounded good. Some ladies from her apartment complex wanted her to come and visit her old apartment.

Instead I find myself talking to hospice workers who say that according to their best estimates, she has about a day left. She shows all the signs, they say, of someone who is spending more time in the other world than in this one–and those fleeting smiles, the nurse told me–it’s as though she’s gone inward and is communicating with perhaps those who are waiting for her on the other side. I was as surprised to hear a nurse talk like that as I was to think of my mother going away.

If I call her name, if I get close to her and say, “Mom!” she opens her eyes but does not focus. She squeezes my hand but cannot answer a question. She clamps her lips shut if I try to give her water or food.

But this morning the hospice social worker said to me over my mother’s bedside, “Tell me about your mother. Let’s let her hear you talk about her..” and so I told a few edited, happy stories about my mother’s life–how she’d been a cheerleader, and about how one must never play with firecrackers and how a man who hasn’t seen colored toenails must be avoided at all costs, especially if he already had a girlfriend back home–and I looked over, and my mother, with her eyes closed, was smiling a big, wide grin.

And when I said, “I love you so much,” she squeezed my hand as hard as she could. 

And now I must get back to the hospital, because I don’t have much longer to see those fleeting smiles, that sweep of blond bangs, and to see if I can’t remember something else to tell her.