N. West Moss

Word Count 403

Today is my mother’s 89th birthday. All she wants is a boiled Nathan’s hotdog with relish, a side of the expensive coleslaw, and a root beer float.

My mother is dying. Last week the palliative care nurse practitioner came to the house in Westchester and walked us through things. I asked her how long she felt Mom had, and she rightly turned to my mother and said, “Would you like me to answer that?”

“God damned right,” my mother said.

“Anything could happen but I would say a few months.” It was pouring and the nurse practitioner was wearing very cute espadrilles, and all I could think was that I didn’t want her to slip on the slate path on her way back to the car.

My mother asked my sister and me to go through her scarves. Mom led quite the life in New York City. My father was an announcer on WQXR for 50 years, and they went to every play, every restaurant, every art opening on earth, so we went through well over a hundred scarves – a symbol of a woman with style leading a glamorous life.

She tells me now that she is ready to die, that she is happy, that she had led a great life. She was one of the original Clairol “Does she or doesn’t she” girls (as Dad liked to joke, noting their four kids, “Apparently she does.”) Now though, she is thin. She has lost a lot of weight. The malignant 8.5 centimeter tumor sitting at the cecum, (the point where the large and small intestines meet), was described to me as having a metabolism of its own. So while she can still eat a bit, the pounds shed anyway. “I don’t want to live through another winter,” she tells my sister and me, but when she tells me what to take to give away to Goodwill, she keeps back one warm coat, because who knows.

Mom and I are reading Roth’s Goodbye Columbus together, and I wonder who will I ever read with now? There’s no one. She will never come back to my house again, and so the garden makes me sad. Everything beautiful hurts. Maybe that’s what grief is, when beautiful things cause you pain.

She told me that she isn’t sad. “I know,” I said, “but I’m sad.”

“Of course you are,” she said, “You’re the one being left behind.

N. West has a memoir: Flesh and Blood: Reflections on Infertility, Family, and Creating a Bountiful Life out right now from Algonquin. In addition to her short story collection, she also has a middle grade novel forthcoming from Little, Brown.