My mother died last Friday. Several people have since expressed shock about her passing. I think, though, she had been in the process of dying for a while. And now I am in the process of trying to understand my feelings about our relationship and her passing.

I know my experience of my mother was different than that of any of my older sisters, different than her friends, and different than the ladies she’d entertain with her singing at Tease, the beauty parlor she frequented.

About three years ago she began having falls. The first happened while walking from the driveway to my sister’s front door for Thanksgiving dinner (We bandaged and wrapped my mother’s head until appetizers and main courses were served as she didn’t want to miss them). The second occurred in the Oak Park Temple parking lot before a Friday night Sabbath service. The third occurred as she walked from her parked car on her way to Tease for her weekly hair appointment. She tore some ligaments in her hand during that fall, necessitating hand surgery and physical therapy and giving my sister and I had a good excuse to retire her car keys and sell her low mileage tank, i.e., her beloved beige Buick.

After that point, I started making regular Sunday visits to spend a little time with her and take her to the grocery store. Her hips were starting to hurt. With her mobility weakening, she could barely walk without a cane or walker, but she loved to push the shopping cart up and down the aisles of the Jewel. She leaned on the cart and didn’t have to put much weight on her legs. After several months of shopping this way, I decided to change our routine. It was a very time-consuming way to shop. I would take her to the store, sit her on the bench near the registers, pick up all the items on her list then call her to the check-out specifically to sign the credit card receipt. Around October, she didn’t feel like walking any more, and I started to take her credit card and bank card and do her shopping and banking for her, signing her name when required.

My sister and I started exploring the possibilities of hip replacement surgery in the fall. Her right hip seemed to be the biggest source of pain for her. She stopped walking altogether mid-December and while she was waiting and waiting and waiting to have her “surgery,” (she was scheduled and canceled three times), we hired home-care workers to stay with her 24/7.

While we re-directed our energies into discovering and, ideally, medically correcting whatever was standing in the way of replacing her worn-out joint, we learned that our mother had bone metastases, lesions of cancer, from some unknown source. My mother, sister and I then began a different journey.

Barbara, who was not very involved in my mother’s life prior to fall of last year, became chief internet researcher, physician interrogator, and coordinator of homecare staff. I kept up with my visits and shopping duties, although now I was also trying to keep mom’s house in Doritos and Coke for her contracted posse whose main job was carrying her to the commmode. Both my sister and I talked to the physical therapists and homecare staff that visited our mother and compared notes. My sister and I were talking more often and about more meaningful topics than I can ever remember.

Four weeks ago, we got her new oncologist to admit her to Rush University Medical Center so that we could have other tests done as an in-patient. They performed the hip surgery we had tried for so long to see her through — only now the medical experts did it so that her right leg bone would, literally, not break. My sister and I placed her at a skilled nursing facility for required rehab.

I took her back to Rush for a day of outpatient follow-up visits just over a week ago. The next day, after observing shaking and vomiting, the nursing facility sent her back to the medical center by ambulance. I met her at the ER. She was x-rayed and hydrated, put on oxygen and asked if she knew where she was by a flurry of good-looking young residents. Eventually she was admitted. Over the next few days, as I realized her “confusion” was more than confusion (Each day, she lost more of her ability to communicate.), specialists conferred with me on all range of treatment options, none of which came with a guaranteed result or benefit. My sister, our family’s chief medical officer, was on a cruise ship in the Grenadines. I was on my own, wanting to do the right things.

Two days after being admitted, when it was clear that she was going through multi-organ shut-down, I placed her on hospice. The next day, when my sister and brother-in-law got back to town, they pretty much headed directly to the hospital. Once on hospice, where she was given a potent IV cocktail for relaxation, her involuntary jerking movements stopped. That made me feel it was okay to invite her fourteen year-old granddaughter to see her.

The four of us spent last Friday afternoon and evening with her. I swabbed her dry lips with a sponge tipped, water-soaked stick. There wasn’t much more I could do. We left my mother’s room at 8:00 and caught a light bite near the medical center. Not two hours after I got home, her floor nurse called me to say that she had passed away.

I have an odd appreciation for how things actually worked out. What most people want, I think, are “happy endings.” The best we can hope for and what we can’t help but receive if we’re willing to embrace life as it is – are perfect resolutions. And aren’t all resolutions perfect?

In her dying from kidney failure instead of experiencing the advance of her bone cancer, my mother found an exit strategy that probably was more kind. My sister who had been pulling extra duty in service to my mother, my youngest niece and her husband badly needed a vacation. She completed hers as planned. And I needed to feel like an adult.

Marveling at the process of life, including death, is no small thing.