First-person |

In the last weeks of her life, my mother began asking my brother and me, "What do I do now?"

Was she being existential? Practical? Fatalistic? Or was she confused?

She had every reason to question us. My brother and I had moved her twice in three months, first from her much-loved home of nine years in Wallingford (where she lived when I first wrote about her for The Seattle Times in 2007). When she needed more care, we moved her to assisted living on Queen Anne, and then to a rented apartment in my brother's condo building in Belltown.

Usually when she asked, "What do I do now?" I would explain that she could read, or we could play gin rummy. But I wondered whether she could have been telling us she was caught between this life and the next.

Just a day or two before her death, she exclaimed to a family friend, "Why, it's a whole new world!" Did she glimpse the future? We like to think she saw, waiting for her, her own mother, her siblings, our father and the many friends and family she outlived.

Just a few days before she died, she told me she wanted to move back to Oregon. I saw no harm in fantasizing with her about it. I said I'd go, too.

Her quality of life was good to the end. On a sunny March 5, she took a ride around Belltown in her wheelchair. She was dressed, Revlon No. 525 Wine With Everything on her lips, wearing her faithful fake pearl necklace and earrings.

The next day our mother, Lucille Sterling Morris, died peacefully at age 97.

For my brother Sterling and me, the stress and joys of caregiving were over.

On March 7, my phone rang precisely at 8:30 a.m. I knew why Sterling was calling. For years, at 8:30 a.m., he would drive to her place and test her blood sugar. She would lift up her sweater or blouse, and together they would grab a small roll of her creamy white tummy for the insulin injection. Then he would have breakfast with her and begin the daily vitamin and tonic regimen he created for her that could have kept dinosaurs from becoming extinct.

As I wrote at the time, he could lean close, speak directly into her ear and convince her to take the pill, roll up her sleeve, drink this, try harder.

Now, if he sleeps at all, he is awake at 7 a.m., his body and mind still on automatic pilot preparing for the morning caregiving shift. There is a hole in his life. "I don't know what to do," he said that first morning.

More recently, he explained, "Mother was the structure of my life. I have this anxious feeling all the time. Right now, there's nothing I have to do but get up and live. I'm lonesome. You have to get a new purpose."

After my mother's death, a family friend remarked on the smell of my mother, how distinct it was. For several days after she died, I returned to her apartment, just to sit on the sofa where she spent her last night and breathe her in.

I set out, like a sleuth, to track down the origin of the scent.

Was it from one of the several cologne bottles she kept on her dresser? I hadn't seen her use perfume in years. Was it a combination of Baby Wipes, her Depends and the Vaseline my brother massaged on the bottom of her feet to help clear her congested lungs?

Then, while packing some of her toiletries I planned to keep (including the Revlon No. 525 Wine With Everything), I discovered the source: It was her Coty Airspun Face Powder, medium beige tone. When she applied it in the morning, a thin dusting entered the atmosphere; it traveled from her cheek to her shoulder, from her sweater to the couch with the gold brocade, from her face to the cotton handkerchief she carried every day.

I have the round container of face powder, her lipstick and her handkerchiefs in a hatbox. I open it every day and take a deep breath.

Sterling and I get together for breakfast or lunch about once a week, and we talk every day. When my car was in the shop, he drove me to work. We're both under less stress. We haven't argued and hung up the phone. I haven't thrown another jar of horseradish, as I did years earlier during one of our spats over Mother's care. We had fought terribly over whether I helped enough. He wanted me to do more; I was juggling careers and trying to start a new life, having moved to Seattle from New York.

Now we are united in our loneliness for our mother. Every baby boomer we know seems to be caring for a parent, or has just lost one or both. We compare notes with them. "I feel like the loneliest person in the world," I heard Sterling tell a friend.

Today I was a little less lonely for our mother. Tomorrow I might cry all day. Sterling and I have grieved before, for our father, for my two young husbands, for friends. But this is different. I wonder if this is how a parent feels when he or she loses a child.

Sterling says we'll bring her home this Mother's Day. We'll pick up her ashes, which will be mixed with our father's. Sterling will have some, and I will have some. I've asked for a third box so I can take her home to Oregon.

Then we'll ask ourselves, "What do we do now?"

Rebecca Morris has been a broadcast and print journalist for 34 years. She teaches journalism at Bellevue Community College.