I was 19 when my mother pulled me to her bedside. We knew the end was near, but none of us had extrapolated Mom's gradual decline to that November day in a bleak hospital room. Our ordinarily functional family was in total denial. Dad retreated to the back lot where he fussed incessantly with his apple trees and his bee hives. My sister Carson passed the time in the den buried in her Emily Dickinson anthology, contemplating Mom's impending death from the safe platform of poetic abstraction. And as for me -- what can I say -- it was Sunday afternoon, the Colts were playing the Philadelphia Eagles, and the cable TV in the Cumberland hospital carried the Baltimore stations. On the day Mom passed away, I was in the chair beside her hospital bed -- eating her lunch and waiting for the 1:00 PM kickoff. Mom was more comfortable with me anyway. Dad and Carson wore her down, but I let her sleep. Mom and I found our own private comfort zone where conversation seemed irrelevant. Sometimes it is a blessing to be male and shallow.
      Dad's visits were confined to short spurts during which he chattered about the Garrett County Farm Coop and the Frostburg Beekeepers Association. He was definitely antsy about Mom's declining health, but she welcomed his visits anyway. After 27 years of marriage, they had reached a plateau where expectations and reality merged into a sympathetic tolerance. She lay in her bed, smiling as he rattled off his list for the day: the pharmacy for painkillers, the medical supply store for a hospital bed, the grocery store for the few foods Mom could tolerate. Dad was ready to bring Mom home -- prepared for every contingency except the eventual outcome. He should have pulled up a chair in front of the game and joined me as I watched over Mom's final hours. Instead he laid his hand on my shoulder, mumbled a few parting words, and disappeared into the Cumberland afternoon, unable to face the room's sad, gray walls and Mom's pale, sagging flesh. I turned up the volume, and Mom relaxed back onto her pillows.
A steady stream of visitors flowed in and out of the room all afternoon -- my Aunt Joyce to ask forgiveness for a petty squabble over a pocket watch she had misappropriated from their father's estate -- Connie Blackman to thank Mom for her support during her own bout with breast cancer -- Billy Marshall, the family lawyer, with a final bit of paperwork -- the garden club with a bouquet of her favorite wildflowers -- the other members of the church choir with a parting hymn. When the day had run its course, Mom was at peace with our entire community -- neighbors, parishioners, townspeople, brothers and sisters, me and Dad -- everyone except Carson. After the last guest departed, Mom hovered in a shallow sleep, opening her eyes hopefully at the slightest sound from the hallway.
      Mom and Carson had argued all month over Carson's upcoming move to Baltimore for an internship in journalism at the Evening Sun. I admit it was a good career move, but Mom refused to consider her only daughter living alone in the city. They were strong willed women in different places -- emotionally and chronologically. Mom was securely anchored on her Garrett County hilltop where she sat in the kitchen surveying her world through the bay window: the panorama of the valley below, her wildflower garden, the folk art on our barn, Dad working on the back lot. Carson on the other hand needed much more than our small community could offer: an apartment in the city, a boyfriend who was not a junior executive at Celanese Fiber or Kelly Springfield Tire, a camera in her hand as she scouted the streets in search of a story, her words and photos in the newspaper. Two days before the end, after they exchanged bitter, hurtful words, Carson stomped out of the hospital room and never returned. That is how I knew Mom was dying. The old Mom would have chased her around the block until they reestablished a semblance of congeniality. But the new Mom, the one lying in the hospital bed, was too weak to try.
      The nurse was in and out all afternoon checking the monitors and adjusting the morphine drip. On her final pass though the room, she turned off the television and motioned me into the chair beside Mom's bed. Then she left us alone in an uncomfortable silence. The old Mom would have beseeched the All-mighty to care for us after she was gone, but the new Mom just lay there, gathering her strength for a few final words. Her weak hand -- loose, pocked flesh hanging over brittle bone -- reached out and grasped my arm. Her voice was low, her face grimaced, and her time short when she rose from the pillow and pursed her lips. I leaned forward.
      "Son, take care of your sister. Tell her I know she loves me."
      I endured a long unscripted silence, staring at the emergency buzzer, as Mom's hand lay motionless on my arm and her breathing slowed and stopped. I have no recollection when or if I reached for the buzzer, but I do remember being startled out of my trance when the nurse crashed back into the room. After taking stock of the situation, she checked Mom's pulse, folded her arms on her chest, and pressed her eyes closed. Later that evening family and friends gathered at our home -- all playing their roles in a more conventionally scripted drama. None were aware of the scene several hours earlier when Mom passed away.
Technically I delivered Mom's message over dinner the next evening - "By the way, Sis, Mom knows you love her" -- but it was many years before I bundled the message into a kind, gentle package and laid it at my sister's feet. When I was a myopic 19 year-old male, it seemed hardly relevant whether my sister had this information or not. Years later I came to realize that I was a dying woman's only means to reach beyond the grave and guide her distraught daughter through a tumultuous period.

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