The Obligatory Grief

Mom will be the first in her family to die in a hospice. It’s my turn to stand vigil, and my hand is wrinkled from the sweat of hers. In a few hours when Mom passes, I’ll have her cremated as she requested. She wouldn’t like the urn I picked, but it won’t be on her mantle. She wouldn’t want to die in a strange place, but she won’t notice that either. Overall, my mother will get what she always aspired to—a good death.
My grandma died of liver cancer, the long gestating price of the pol- luted water she drank in war-battered Vietnam until her GI whisked her to a life that was, if not happier, then at least difficult in new ways. Grandma died at home, with my heavily pregnant mother lying in the bed beside her. And I lay there too, curled between generations, a long gestating consequence myself. When, at two in the morning, my mother woke and found her mother perfectly still, she pulled the blanket over the cold face and slept for another hour. She was tired, and today would be hard. But this was a good death. That much, my mother could give her mother.
Mom told me all this when I was twelve, as we too lay in bed together. I had slipped in to wake her from an afternoon nap and ended up snuggled next to the familiar hearth of her body. Sleep made her nostalgic. In the silence that followed the sentences that killed her mother, Mom dozed off. I listened to her breathe. I listen now. As I crawl into bed beside her, I think what maybe she thought then: this is the natural order of tragedies. Here we are, at the happiest of our possible endings.