She received us with a fright, Lillibeth and me, her body half-hidden behind the door as she opened it. “I’m not ready for bed just yet,” she said twice. Mom had recently taken to fearing bedtime and would say this repeatedly before remembering me and that it’s not my mission to put her to bed. “It’s about time you’re here, Sassy,” she added, exhaling.

“Mom, have you had dinner yet?” She shuffled away from my question in her slippers and robe, plopping down in her armchair and taking up a magazine.

“I’m pooped, Sister” was her response as Lillibeth could be heard cranking open the can of split-pea soup in the kitchen. Looking over at Mom’s natural pine Christmas tree, I was surprised to see it was stripped bare of ornaments and lights. Considering we’d spent over three hours together getting the decorations in place, I couldn’t imagine how she’d managed to get them all taken down and put away in the two hours we’d been off the phone.

“Mom, I thought we agreed you would wait for me to take down the Christmas decorations?”

Mom remained silent, staring at her magazine. Lillibeth carried in the soup from the kitchen, and I could see the steam rising from it in the dim light. “Here, Grandma,” she said. “It’s hot, so be careful.” Lillibeth then addressed me, still looking at Mom, “She must have done it all yesterday and forgot, Ma.”

I turned toward Mom’s hallway closet and searched it, finding only raincoats and a parka on hangers, a broom and dustpan leaned against the wall. Downstairs, I rolled open the closet door in the guest room and saw unpacked boxes from her last move, more clothing. Returning to the living room, I noticed the stockings we’d hung from the fireplace were gone—as well as her nutcracker figures, and the winter village that lights up when it’s plugged in. “Mom, where are all of the Christmas decorations?”

She replied that she threw away the wrapping paper for the garbage man. I knelt to her and reminded her we didn’t unwrap any presents at her house, asking, “What exactly did you throw away?”

“Just the junk.”

Immediately, I rose and headed for the back door. Lillibeth placed her hand on my shoulder as I passed. Outside, both trash cans were empty. Foolishly, I looked around in the snow. The garbage truck had come that morning. Four decades’ worth of Christmas decorations my mom and I had affixed great meaning to had gone away with it.

As an in-home hospice nurse, our care team is away from the sterile, whitewashed hospital room. In the patient’s home, I sometimes see their quilting tacked to the wall, the family pictures on the mantle, their dog that whines uneasily as it sidles next to me. It’s not for everyone, but I prefer it to the hospital. Changing the person’s clothing, their bedpans, their intubation, all in the bedroom of their healthier years. Bathing them, helping feed them, or brushing their teeth, you get settled with the smell of their well-lived-in home. There’s a familial intimacy there that transcends a strictly professional realm. The work is emotionally taxing, but, if you’re willing, you’ll learn a thing or two about patience and resilience.

My patience, the resilience I thought had built up from years as a nurse, was wearing thin when visiting Mom. I was exhausted by her unwavering independence and her demands to live alone even though it was clear she needed help. She still does basic care for herself like bathing and dressing, but with similar effort, she had begun to wage battles when forgetting her stance on a subject or why she’d claimed it. She’d also been forgetting names, deceased siblings or ex-husbands, cats she’d let wander off. Sometimes her words will derail mid-sentence and leave her quiet, a vacant look on her face, as she’s forgotten even how to feel embarrassed. My mom. My mentor for clarinet, baking, and for how to raise a daughter as a single mother. My art coach and co-fashioner of Christmas tree ornaments. The woman who, humming gleefully, had hung the scarlet, orange, and white plaid wallpaper on her kitchen walls while my teenage-self huffed, rolling my eyes in protest, before at last developing a fondness for the same wallpaper in the years following as it was truly and uniquely “Mom.”

Memories like these come to me at random, from all her moments of teaching, when Mom was still fully herself, and my admiration for her that had always come naturally returns. I had become exhausted though by how consuming she could and must be, and by the way a certain tone in her voice demonstrated a familiar, matronly advantage over me.

Thank goodness Lillibeth was with me on the day of the Christmas decorations. I was near tears on the ride home, and Lillibeth said in a buoying tone, “So what, Ma? They’re just things.” This wasn’t diminishing the value of the decorations that Mom and I had hand-made or collected for over forty-four years. She knows what they meant to us; how the act of decorating the tree was our ritual bond of sorts, our thing to rejuvenate and propel us into each new year. Lillibeth was right though—no matter how many memories are owed to them, decorations are just things that can be replaced.

Without Lillibeth’s help, with as much as I get held up at work, it wouldn’t have been possible for Mom to live alone for as long as she did. But, also, next door to Mom lived a priest, Father Monserrate. He is our patron saint of forgotten trash cans, left wide-open front doors. He often helped with Mom, bringing her trash cans back and forth from the curb, or herding in some of the once-missing cats. If neither Lillibeth nor I could make it over, he did the dinner check on Mom.

A few weeks after the decorations fiasco, I was having my third cigarette since quitting, out back of Mom’s house. Father Monserrate was taking out his trash and waved hello. I took a hurried drag from the cigarette before stamping it into the driveway. Father approached me and we both looked out over the driveway at the hardened snow and the yellow sky in the distance. His hands in his pockets, he asked, “How’s everything?”

I told him everything was shit. My frankness surprised us both I think, but he chuckled and so I became less tense.

“I won’t argue with you there,” he offered.

Father, why is this happening to my mom? Why is this happening to me? I want to ask him this, but I don’t. She’s had it rough all her life. God knows I’ve had it rough. I want to say this, too, plead, but I don’t. What I do tell him is that I am burnt out. I tell him that I am getting steamrolled. It’s the most honest thing I’d said to anyone outside of work in a long time. “I love my mom, Father Monserrate, but she can be a pain in my ass.”

“Scripture reminds us to honor our parents, especially when we feel tested,” said Father, though he knows I’m not one bit religious.

“I’m trying, Father,” I said. “I’m trying to honor her requests. She’s adamant about living alone, and she refuses other caretakers. I try so hard to make her requests work,” I told him. “But I feel like I’m doing everything wrong. I feel that leaving her by herself goes against all conventional wisdom. And she’s herself less and less…” my voice trailed off then as that was the first time I’d heard myself say out loud that Mom was disappearing.

I could hear Father Monserrate take a deep breath and resituate his feet on the icy pavement. Having him there was calming. Finally, he said, “Sometimes, all we can do is look out at the sky, take a deep breath, and try again the next day.”

I remember many of our patients. Some I had known only for hours, others, for weeks. Mr. Tolbarth, with his silver tooth and diseased heart—my care team and I met him on a Monday morning in his home up the steep drive. The same evening, the physician was filling out the time of death. Eileen Raffling with pancreatic cancer had us making Bundt cakes two days straight (for her grown children) and was even knitting a scarf on the third Thursday of our visits to her, feeding her fish that Friday afternoon. I found out on my day off that she’d passed and had adopted out her fish one apiece to myself and two other nurses.

Mom’s decline reminded me of a particular patient from years ago, one whom I had often found had many similarities with Mom: Ms. Mona. The two shared an indefatigable willfulness, a feistiness that slept only when they would. Her losing battle with stage-four throat cancer was what had placed Ms. Mona into my team’s care, and, like Mom, she had begun experiencing dementia. Also, like Mom, she was exquisite, even in her mid-seventies, and looked more glamorous with her silk pajamas and quaffed hair than any of us nurses ever did.

A professional salsa and tango dancer born in Argentina, Ms. Mona had lived between Paris and Amsterdam most of her life until following her children to the States in her early sixties. She had sailed around the world in her own schooner and could speak four languages, though she didn’t know how to apologize in even one of them. She was vulgar, highly irreverent, and a prankster, in her right mind. On her bedside table were two photographs of her when she was younger. The pictures showed her with long, dark hair, big, round eyes, and the glow and elegance of fine porcelain. Looking at those pictures one day, I wondered what 1960s Paris must have been like for her, smoking her long-stem cigarettes and gallivanting around places I couldn’t even pronounce, let alone imagine.

As her dementia worsened, she could become very ornery, and at times claimed abuse by us, cursing us in languages we didn’t know. Even when her grown children were available to reassure her, she would sometimes wail at the sight of us, saying that we were keeping her prisoner. We never took hurt from her words. She was endeared to us, and we secretly vied for her favoritism. That she died during one of my evenings with her was especially hard. I didn’t want to start again the next day with a new person who I’d foolishly root for after the final score had already been decided.

When she was in a lucid state, Ms. Mona enjoyed playing games. Once, when one of her sons and his daughter were there, she asked me to join in a card game called Hearts. I was a little uneasy about it since I hadn’t played the game since childhood, but Ms. Mona proclaimed it was her favorite.

Hearts is a four-player card game where players combine strategy and luck, dealing out and collecting cards from the middle. If your score goes up, it’s bad news, like the game of golf. Collecting any of the cards in the suit of hearts adds one point to your running score, and collecting the queen of spades adds a total of thirteen points to your tally, which—should go without saying—is egregious. The winner of a game is the player with the lowest total score when any other player reaches one hundred points through a series of rounds.

Even in her frail state, Ms. Mona was able to achieve a special move in Hearts called shoot the moon. To shoot the moon, a player must purposely gather all the hearts and the queen of spades in a round. If done successfully, this passes on to all other players the maximum points that can be incurred in a round (twenty-six) while the player achieving the trick incurs zero points, which again, is good in this game. I learned that you can’t try to shoot the moon, the opportunity has to blossom before you as you play your cards right against the longest odds, and if you fail, you fail miserably by incurring many points.

When Ms. Mona achieved this, she announced softly, “I shoot the moon!” a wide grin on her face. I had to ask her how she had done it, as it was clear to me that to shoot the moon meant accomplishing a seemingly impossible task. She wheezed and drew her son close to her, whispering in his ear. He then relayed her words to me: “By doing everything wrong, by making all the moves you know you’re not supposed to, but in the right way.”

The gash on Mom’s forehead was the last straw. It happened sometime last Thursday evening after I’d left her place, or the following morning. She has no memory of how or when it happened. Her gash was just a new feature I was surprised to see when I visited that Friday morning, finding her in her armchair, unabashedly displaying it like a new hairdo. She was eating a banana and was in a good state, unaware of how the dried blood got onto her forehead.

I was just about to start a long shift, so Lillibeth came over that afternoon once she was finished with work to stay the night at Mom’s. I returned there on Saturday morning to find them flipping through some of Mom’s magazines, steam rising from their coffee mugs. When I stepped into the living room, they both smiled and said Hello before returning their attention to the magazines. I wondered if Mom recognized me. I wondered if Lillibeth recognized how bittersweet it was watching them. Grandmother and granddaughter, linked through me, linked by their lovely stubbornness. A fleeting moment that made me pause, even if time won’t.

I left them in their reverie and stepped out back of Mom’s house. I lit my sixteenth cigarette since quitting, a light snow falling on my fingers as I dragged from it. Father Monserrate came out his back door, carrying some trash bags. I couldn’t believe the timing but made no effort to hide my cigarette.

He waved hello, discarded his bags in his trash cans and came over to stand next to me. We each offered a Good Morning, and Father looked up into the heavens as if searching for the source of the snow.

After a moment of quiet, I said, “We’re listing the house.”

“Oh?” he said, “your mother is selling her house?”

I thought for a bit about our last conversation, about honoring parents and taking deep breaths and trying again the next day. The day prior, seeing Mom’s gash, I’d resolved to accept that, as hard as I’d tried, I’d failed. There was no more trying to be done to make Mom’s requests work. I was going to honor her in a different way.

“Mom doesn’t know,” I told Father. “Lillibeth’s friend is a real estate agent, and the first open house is next weekend.” I went on to tell him about the gash on Mom’s head, about the hours of sleep I wasn’t getting because of worry for her, about how, with as much stress as my job brought to my life, honoring Mom’s request to live alone added twice that amount, which seemed unfair and selfish of her.

I half-expected Father Monserrate to chide me, to cite something biblical like Let he who is without sin cast the first stone but instead, he nodded his head and with a solemn smile said, “I think it’s the right time, Sandra. You’ve done more than any one person alone should.”

I wiped a snowflake off my nose and dabbed a tear from my eye before dropping that final cigarette.

Reentering Mom’s house through the back door, I found Lillibeth on the phone in the kitchen. I could hear based on her responses that she was discussing rates with a moving company: one truck; one day; at least two movers; two miles distance. I walked past her to find Mom in the living room.

I was going to kneel to her in her chair, hold her hand and say something like Mom, we’ve tried everything in our power to make all the wrong plays the right way, and hope against all odds that doing everything we’re not supposed to do would somehow work out for us. It’s time to stop trying to make the wrong thing work. You’re coming to live with Lillibeth and me starting tonight. When I approached her to take her hand, it was like she sensed news she didn’t want was coming, and she turned her chair to look dozily out the window at the falling snow. She appeared sad and more exhausted than I was. I took her hand, anyway, and she did not resist it.

“I’m pooped, Sassy,” she said.

“Me too, Mom,” I told her.

– Darren Montufar