Sophia grunts against the dead weight of her mother, chest pressing to shoulder in a mock lover’s embrace. Protestations follow, wallowing from both parties as she resists, pushing against the one she thrust from a womb now turned coat and traitor.

“Ay, mama. Please,” Sophia begs, voice muffled by the down pillows as they careen back and forth, the slow decay scent of funeral lilies wafting with every sway.

With the taught rubber band of her spine close to snapping, Sophia lays her mother down again and wriggles her fingers between the sweat and soiled linens until they meet in the middle, clasping them together. Now cheek to cheek, they pant the labor of their efforts in the shallow pools of their necks. Sophia waits to exhale on her final breath, then just as her mother releases hers, she yanks her upright and forward, using the last bit of her strength and marrying it to the bitter taste in the back of her throat.

“You’re hurting me!”

“Why must you make this harder than it needs to be?”

“Just get it over with already.”

“I’m trying—”

“Put me out of my misery.”

“Not this again.”

Sophia peers over her mother’s shoulder. What a fine mess.

—

Inoperable. Stage 4B. Organ failure. Hospice.

Shower. Meds. Pureed meals. Diapers.

Sophia tallies the lists together, both of which she can’t change. She empties a glass of water, impatient to dilute the bile of an empty stomach, the pattern of her thoughts. It clinks against the countertop as she sets it down and watches the sun rise from the kitchen window. A list of her own was lost somewhere in the flame of the horizon.

She faced the irony long ago that her body’s refusal to bear, the crux of her deteriorating marriage, aligned so neatly with the tumors that formed in her mother’s uterus, devouring her from the inside out. Her relationship was not yet doomed after the first false start, but began to crumble after the second and then the third, and soon it came and went along with the family she dreamed of becoming, replaced by a mother clawing her way to death’s door.

Sophia fills another glass and closes her eyes against the thought that always followed this worn and beaten path of her mind. Somehow worse than the fate of her marriage was the brush with death she avoided by order of her doctor. Coupled with her mother’s diagnosis, the risk was too high, and the chances of her carrying to term were too low. Gone was the home within a home, the part meant to bring life into the world. Now, both mother and daughter could bear no more.

—

“Luca, you haven’t been to see your mother in weeks. She asks for you all of the time.” Sophia stirs a pot of sopa de fideo with the receiver tucked chin to collar. Steam rises to greet her, and she inhales the familiar smells of garlic and tomato.

“No, she doesn’t,” came a breath over the line.

“There isn’t much time. You have to…you might regret it if you don’t.” Sophia pleaded with her brother.

“I can’t do it, see her like that. She’s not the mother I know.”

“She’s dying, Luca.”

“I don’t know how you do it,” was all he had left to say.

She balances the two bowls on a tray and braces herself for the battle ahead. Broth sloshes over the rim as she slides her feet to her mother’s room.

“Dinner’s ready!” Sophia swallows the conversation with her brother and throws cheer into her voice for encouragement.

The lines of her mother’s lips gradually disappear into the hole of her mouth, swallowed by her insolence. Sophia knew they would be locked like a vice. More than once she had caught her holding her breath, face blue and veins popping. She had to pry her mother’s mouth open until she unwillingly gasped for air.

“You have to eat, mama,” Sophia says and rests the tray on a wheeled table hanging over the electronic bed.

Back and forth her mother’s head whips, so fast she aimed to break it.

“Please,” Sophia reaches for the spoon when her mother flings her body upward, toppling the tray over them both.

Her voice chorusing in agony and arms laced with burns, Sophia lunges for the blankets covering her mother’s withering frame, hoping they were enough to spare her from the worst of the heat.

“I don’t want this. I didn’t ask for any of this,” her mother says to the ceiling.

—

“Soph! Dinner!” called her mother in a memory.

Nimble footsteps forge the path for years not yet lost to the hands of age. Lighter then, heavy now.

“Come, mija. Tell me about your day.” Her mother said as she slipped into her work uniform.

Night shifts sweating on hospital floors, more shadow than mother, she made small moments grand with the spotlight of her attention. Sophia leaned forward over the table and breathed deeply, smiling up at her mother, both blissfully ignorant of what was to come.

“Bein y mal,” Sophia whispered as she waited for the soup to cool.

“What’s this, good and bad? What troubles you?”

Sophia shakes her head to dislodge the memory, see it in full. The conversation dissolves, but an image remains like the soft color outline of a photo left in the sun. Her mother’s face turned to her, eyes and heart open, ready to bear any pain that belonged to her daughter. As she spreads aloe on her wounds like her mother once taught her to do, Sophia weeps for the whole of herself lost to the half that remains. And for the cruelty of the role she must take, no longer her mother’s child but a caregiver, not by necessity but by rite. Not because she should, but because she must.

Where love lived, resentment bloomed.

—

The ink smudged on her signature as Sophia passed the paper, leaving behind the corner of her fingerprint like a seal.

“And you’re sure this is the right decision? Home hospice can be very grueling for both the patient and the carer. I assure you, our facilities would make her more than comfortable.” The woman with the red-tipped fingernails said.

“She would want to be at home.” Sophia flicked the corners of her mouth up in a smile to be polite and continued to stare down at the woman’s nails.

It was partially true. Her mother wanted to be at home when the time came, the place where she had grown from a girl to a woman, having inherited it from her parents. But what Sophia couldn’t say—why she avoided the nice woman’s eyes in favor of her crimson fingertips—was that her mother only wanted to die. There’s no point in waiting, she said after revealing her fate to Sophia and her brother. Your father is looking for me on the other side.

Luca wanted to keep her at the hospital, but Sophia refused. The thought of allowing the woman who raised them, blood and bone, rot next to strangers was unthinkable. The woman who mended her daughter’s hurt when she ignored her own failing body, screaming at her for attention. The diagnosis was irrevocably late, but she waited to burden her children with the news until mere months remained. For years, it had been the three of them, their mother taking on both roles for as long as Sophia could remember. Their father was a distant memory, gone two months before Luca was born. But her mother was here, in the flesh. She couldn’t let her wait alone.

—

Summer cicadas buzz outside the bedroom window. Sophia glances at the clock on her nightstand, the numbers blurring. The floorboards stick to her bare feet and leave behind ghostly impressions in her wake. Half under the veil of sleep, she fingers the notches immortalized in the doorframe. Her mother’s measured height over the years was almost identical to her own. She wanders the halls of her childhood home as anyone would—by memory.

“Please,”

She stops.

“Please. Let this be the night.”

She listens outside the open door.

“Let this be the night. Let this be the night. Please, please. Let this be the night.”

Sophia walks into her mother’s room on stiff legs, each step not just echoing in the night but the hollow boom of a tree falling in the forest. Her mother chants her pleas to no one, to everyone.

Sophia feels her mother turn toward her.

“Please, Soph.”

She steps forward, a soft down pillow appearing in her hands. A moment of hesitation is thwarted by the relief that washes over her mother, body and soul. Illuminated by a cascade of moonlight, the riverbed lines around her eyes finally soften, the weight of her lids gives way and closes over the vacant stare that for so long saw nothing but the end. Burying into the fabric on either side, howls from both women begin to fill the void between. Voices crack in an endless fury of love and hate, in reverence and condemnation of their roles reversed. Shaking hands, clutching to each other, young to old, one frantically trying to pull away while the other holds them steady.

The pillow tumbles to the floor, and white feathers hover in the air like flags of surrender. With breasts heaving, Sophia and her mother embrace, mourning an end that would not yet come.

Together, they wait.

– Elizabeth Joel

Author’s Note: Fifteen years ago, my grandmother was diagnosed with dementia. Since then, my mother has cared for her in our home—feeding, clothing, changing, and medicating my grandmother in the end stages of her life. I wrote this story as a tribute to them and to all of the women who take care of those who can no longer do so themselves.