I didn’t plan on moving back into my mother’s house. It just happened the way slow things do, so gradually you barely notice the shift until you’re already living inside it. One week I was driving over after work to make dinner for her, and a month later I was sleeping on the pull-out chair next to her bed, listening for her breathing to change in the middle of the night.

The doctors had a way of talking around the truth, like wrapping it in gauze so you couldn’t see the shape of it too clearly. But my mother never asked for the softened version. She’d look them right in the eye and ask how much time she had, and they’d hedge, and she’d nod like she already knew.

Most days were quiet. There’s a kind of silence that comes with illness, not the peaceful kind, but the heavy, watchful sort. I learned the rhythm of her days: when she could sit up, when she needed help to the bathroom, when she couldn’t bear the taste of anything but watered-down broth. I learned how to hold her arm under mine just enough to steady her without making her feel carried. Small things, but they mattered.

The others stopped by sometimes. They came in brisk and loud, bringing store-bought pastries or scented candles she couldn’t tolerate. They didn’t stay long. Fifteen minutes, maybe twenty if they were feeling virtuous. They talked at her about their lives, their errands, their grievances. As if she weren’t fading. As if time weren’t being measured in how many breaths she had left.

They always left with something, too. A check. A promise. A signature. My mother never told them no. I never asked her why. She had her reasons, and I didn’t need to hear them to understand that.

Late at night, when the pain dulled enough for her to speak in full sentences, she’d talk about ordinary things. A recipe her mother taught her. A dress she wore when she was nineteen. The way the house used to smell when the windows were open in spring. She never talked about wills or money or what would happen after. I didn’t ask. It didn’t feel like the time to drag the future into a room that was already filled with the weight of endings.

The mornings were the hardest. That was when she was tired in a way that sleep couldn’t fix, when her hands trembled and her voice thinned out. I’d brush her hair back and run warm water over a washcloth and wipe her face like she did for me when I was small. There was something steadying in it. A loop closing.

One morning, near the end, she reached for my wrist. Her hand was light, bones under paper skin.

“You know why I trust you?” she asked. Her voice was a whisper but clear.

I didn’t answer. I didn’t want to break the moment with the wrong words.

“Because you stay,” she said.

That was it. No speech. No sentimental closing line. Just that.

I sat there holding her hand long after she fell asleep again. There was nothing dramatic about it. No grand revelation. Just the truth of two people who had lived a lot of life together, sitting in the quiet.

She passed on a Tuesday. The kind of overcast morning that doesn’t announce itself.

I made the phone calls. I cleaned the sheets. I opened the windows.

There were no arguments, no fights, no loud scenes. Grief doesn’t always look like the movies. Sometimes it’s just the sound of the house settling and the shape of a pillow where someone used to lie.

Later, after the service and the casserole dishes and the people telling me how strong I was, I stood in that same room. The blinds still half-closed. The mug still on the nightstand. The flowers finally giving up.

I didn’t cry. Not then.

I just sat in the chair, hands folded in my lap, the way I had for months, watching the light shift across the wall.

There was no way to know, in that moment, what she had planned.

Or for whom.

But the house already felt like it was holding something.

Not grief.

Not memory.

Something else.

Waiting.

Continue reading (Chapter-2) » The Will Reading