Her True Calling: My Mother's Last Gift

"What did you expect?" I asked. "It's a religious position."

She sighed, audibly. "I guess I was hoping I could just be whatever each patient needed me to be."

She never became a chaplain. Or mayor. She tried a lot of other things, though, and each gave her a glimpse at satisfaction before falling out of favor. Nothing was enough to keep the cup filled.

And then she got very, very sick, and the search hit a wall.

It was nearly two months after her illness was diagnosed. She was going to die soon, my mother, so I had gone home to be with her, skipping one of those field assignments that months before would have made her gush. I wanted to take care of her as she always did for patients or pets or me when I was hurting. We'd decided to do the humane thing: no chemo, no radiation. She was getting steroids, insulin, morphine now and then. More important were the most basic of things: blankets to keep her warm, chocolate pudding to make her eyebrows lift (our signal for yes), soft music of flutes and wolf howls. Loving hugs.

One night when she could no longer walk, and could barely speak, we were together in her room. The China-red walls were decorated with family pictures my stepfather had hung -- of my husband and me, my brother and his wife, their boy -- the grandchild my mother wanted for years and now would never know. And it got to me -- all of it. The horror of her decline, the humiliation she'd endured. After years of being a nurse to others, she could no longer put a spoon to her mouth or a brush to her hair. And she would fade away some night soon still unsure of who she was.

My stepfather lifted her, a rag doll, onto the portable toilet set up near her bed. Her pajamas were stained down the front with cottage cheese. Blankets trailed from her shoulders, towels lay on the floor from the last cleanup. Pride gone. Muscles gone. Her hair was thin and upended from sleeping and smelled of scalp; that lovely smooth skin had finally lost its youth. And her eyes were heartbreakingly sad; in recent days they'd hardly connected with us, with anything we could see.

I was sitting holding her skeletal hand when I finally broke. Crying aloud, letting it all out -- feelings hidden from her for all those painful weeks. Suddenly a child who had seen too much, I wanted to crawl away and escape the scene, the smell of disinfectant, the trill of that damn flute music that will always, always sing of death to me. I cried knowing there was so much left in life for her to try -- why hadn't I, who quietly shared her vacillating nature, helped her to find what she craved?

And yet my mother, exposed and ready to die, suddenly looked right at me for the first time in weeks, through her stringy hair and straight into my eyes, and held and patted my hand. And she said, her voice gravelly but familiar for one beautiful moment, "It's okay, Jenny. Sweet girl. Don't be sad for me. It's really okay."

And just then it was clear to me, as perhaps it was to her: She was already playing the part that suited her perfectly -- with no audition, no essay, no special declaration but love. Above all, even when intent on the journey to find herself, she had always made time to be a wonderful mother to me, never failing to wipe away my tears and ease my pain. It was the one role she could see through to the end.