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her mother’s bed and as soon as she did so, her mother felt her there and raised her hand so that their fingers were touching and then something moved inside of Katherine that she had never felt before. A startled cry came from her throat and she rose to her feet so abruptly she pushed the chair over when she stood up. Katherine, without thinking, turned down the covers to her mother’s hospital bed, slipped off her shoes, and climbed into bed with her mother.
    Her mother stirred for a second and then moved into Katherine’s arms—her daughter’s arms—as if she were a baby. Katherine held her with such fierceness she wondered for a moment if she might be hurting her mother, her dying, terribly ill mother, and then whatever was passing through her exploded in a shock wave of grief, in the acknowledgment of the finality, in a burst of knowledge that made her moan and cry like she had never cried before in her entire life.
    “Oh Mommy,” she moaned. “Oh Mommy I love you so much.”
    Somehow her mother found the side of Katherine’s face and she moved her fingers in small circles on the skin of her cheek and then she slid her fingers into her hair. Katherine could feel her mother’s labored breathing in her ear, she could feel her heart beating against her own heart and she felt a surge of love so fierce she almost willed herself to die with her mother—almost.
    Katherine’s mind then moved throughout all of the cycles of her life, back to her earliest memories, and into only the fine and wonderful things that she could remember about her mother. She remembered the soft feel of clean sheets against her legs every Friday night and the smell of freshly baked cookies on Saturday mornings. She remembered how her mother packed her lunch and often left notes in the folds of her sandwich wrapping. She remembers how she once viewed her mother as weird and different because she never worked and how her mother held her gently but firmly against the wall one afternoon and said, “Don’t you ever,
ever,
the rest of your life make fun of someone else’s choices.” She remembers her first period and how her mother took her to dinner to celebrate and brought her a silver bracelet that she still wears to “honor all the female parts of her life and the glory of being a woman.” She remembers moments like all of these as if she were on fire and through her sobs and her mother’s tormented breathing she thinks she will explode with the seemingly endless positions of grief.
    Katherine remembers her mother backing off when she was growing up and needed to be alone and then slipping a note under her bedroom door the afternoon her first boyfriend dumped her. She remembers how her mother always waited up and would kiss her without thinking twice in front of friends, in department stores, in the middle of a conversation at a family party. She remembers the day she married and how she found her mother crying softly in the bathroom and how she went to her and said, “Thank you for always being there, Mom.” And how her mother told her that she was the most wonderful daughter a mother could ever hope to have.
    When her mother stirs and then moans out loud, Katherine still remembers. She remembers giving birth to her own daughter and how her mother stood at the window in the hospital and told her, “Now you know,” without ever saying a word. She remembers how just after the baby was born her mother would simply show up on the bad days without a call—and how on those days they would enjoy a small glass of wine with lunch and then maybe another glass in the middle of the afternoon and how Katherine thought she was losing her mind because she had no idea what she was doing, how to raise a baby, how to some days even rise off her own bed. She remembers how her mother walked through the reception line after she received her law degree and leaned to say, “I never ever doubted you for one moment since the day you were born.”
    She