I remember thinking that when my mother was going to die, I would At least, this is how I felt after the

fact. Before it happened I it occurred to me that she could, or would ever, die. Or...I knew ... someday, long after I had graduated high school, college, graduate school, long after I got married, had children. me. When I was ready.

know. don't think that she would When it was ti

When she died, it shocked me. It was like a slap in the face and I stood, holding my stinging cheek for days and weeks and months on end. And it hit me that I had always thought I would know-- that there might be a hospital involved, there would be a long talk with her and a long talk with my father, there would be Doctors who talked of months or weeks or days left. I thought I would see it coming. I thought I would be told.I thought I would be prepared. There was none of that. But still, there was a feeling that I should have known. There was a feeling that perhaps everyone else knew, and I had been blind to the obvious. I was sixteen. I thought I knew everything, and in actuality, I knew nothing. This was true of any subject. But certainly, I thought I would be told when my mother, a longtime sufferer of muscular dystrophy, was dying. I felt supremely stupid. She had been in Hospice care for a decade. Only after her death did I learn that being on Hospice meant a person was at the end of his or her life. I really should have known this. I had watched my great grandparents enter Hospi ce care and pass shortly thereafter. But they truly were at the end of their lives, in their 80s. It was, naturally, their time. In fact, I think I had known what Hospice meant, in a way, and I had thought tha t my mother was the exception. My mother was young, forty-nine years old. And more to the point, I was young. I was sixteen. I needed a mother. Mothers of sixteen year old daughters do not die, they can't. Yet mine did and I should have known. I should have known that when a patient is on a ventilator their days are number ed. But I barely knew of a time when my mother was not on a ventilator. I could bare ly recollect the days before her tracheostomy. Maybe, far off in the corners of my mind, there exists a distant memory of life before. Yes, sitting on her lap, at two or three years old, I helped her flip the pancak es. She was free of tubes and machinery. She was not quite heathy, but not so ill. Yet, this is like a fairytale. It might just be a part of my imagination. The hospita, the ventilator, the suction, the oxygen tank, the wheelchair boundthese were the only days I could remember with certainty. These things were normal for me. I have no concrete memories of my mother existi ng in any other way. I could not conceive the idea that she would ever exist in any other way. And then she died, and my world crashed into itself. And everyone else acted as if they knew it was coming

While I stood in the eye of the storm and screamed.