On the wall opposite her bed is a framed print of a flower-filled doorway, the entrance to a simple white stucco villa, maybe in Spain. I want to step into it, out of this hospital room where my mother lies dying. I look into the glass-protected scene, seeing also the reflection of my smeared eye-makeup and half-styled hair. I want to smell the flowers in the big clay pots, feel the cool slate beneath my feet, wipe my shoes on the roughness of the doormat. She’s sleeping mostly, or crying out angrily at the pain.

It’s not as cold in the room as it was yesterday. The nurses told me they turned the thermostat up on the entire floor to help warm her since her skin had been extremely cold when they bathed her this morning, before I returned. She would like that, the fact that some broad scale change was effected just for her, like a final expression of her life’s purpose.

Someone years ago (it may have been me) nicknamed her The Sentinel. Her guard tower was her third floor apartment where, for the last 20 of her 84 years, it was her self-appointed duty to be on the alert. There were wrongdoers to catch. Non-residents of her senior building ignoring ‘no trespassing’ signs to walk their big dogs. Residents letting their cats walk in the hallways. People parking in the wrong spaces or staying too long in the loading zone. I, too, was under her constant scrutiny. Why did I take so long going down the 3 floors to my car? Who did I talk to and what did they say? Why did I turn right instead of left when I left the parking lot? Where was I going?

I’m seeping through the glass into the Villa courtyard. It makes me think of all the places I never went because I had to stay close by for my mother. My occasional weekend trips inevitably were interrupted by the required frequent calls which connected me with, more often than not, her tearful or angry voice. Evidently the calls, no matter what form they took, reassured her that I was still alive to take her shopping when I returned. Always she demanded extra Days of Me, the pound of flesh in payment for the sin of my travel. She herself never learned to drive, had no real friends, considered the van that took seniors to errands and appointments beneath her. There were no other relatives to help.

The nurse is here, telling me about her grandmother, also 84, who lives in the Midwest with her dad, how when she broke her hip he had moved in with her to help, later building a wing on their farmhouse for her and buying her a golf cart for getting around to the horses and chickens, and to help in the garden. I smile inwardly at the contrast to my mother, a well-dressed city girl from New Jersey who disliked the outdoors, animals, plants and the bugs they attracted. I picture the Midwestern woman out in the sun, motoring through the garden, handing her son his garden tools. I hear it as communication from the Universe. See, it tells me, it could have been worse. She could have broken her hip; I could have had to live with her. But it could have been better, my mind debates, if only I had more money, lived in a big house, hired a caretaker, got her better medical care.

It could have been different, so different, if she had chosen to use her energy positively, to be more engaged in life like the golf-cart grandmother. She could have been the CEO of something, or a first-class private investigator.

A woman with a clipboard full of paperwork comes in. She asks briskly if this is my mother, stating her name, “or what’s left of her” she quips. Her smile turns to embarrassed silence when I quietly tell her she is dying. We sit down. My mother is moaning in the background. I keep one eye on her as I cordially answer the questions. “Thanks for being so kind. You have a good mother, she raised you right,” she says warmly as she leaves.

I sit there, stunning myself with her words, wondering if that was another cosmic message explaining the benefit of having a needy, non-nurturing mother, to help shape me into a kind person.

I would have preferred to have arrived at kindness by being appreciated and encouraged. I recalled, years before, comforting myself with the analogy of how a pearl forms in the oyster, a process of reaction to being irritated by the sand that gets inside the shell.

Part 2 of this 3 part article will resume next month.