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morning, Natalia and I sat side by side next to our mother’s bed. My sister graded her students’ English papers while I drew in my sketchbook. It felt like old times. When we were children, Natalia sat on the bed and wrote stories while I sat next to her and made pictures—rare moments of calm in a turbulent world. I still felt at home sitting only a few inches apart, her writing, me drawing, neither of us saying a word. Soon our mother would be moved to a nursing home. We were waiting to find out where she would be placed. She still thought she was going “home.”
    There was a radio in the room now; one of the nurses had brought it in after I told her how my mother’s favorite classical music station calmed her down, and that she listened to it twenty-four hours a day. Christmas was in three days and every radio station was playing “Jingle Bells.”
    “Turn that holiday crap off,” said my mother. “I can’t stand it anymore.”
    “I’ll bring some CDs as soon as I can get a CD player,” I said.
    “What’s a CD?”
    “It’s a little record. I’ll get you some classical music. Don’t worry.”
    “Well, hurry up. This crap is killing me.”
    I only came home once during Christmastime, the first year after I left for college. My Russian Orthodox grandfather was still alive then and he was the only one in the family who celebrated Christmas. After he died in1980, our mother always spent the holidays alone, or with our grandmother, the two of them eating corned beef sandwiches, watching sitcoms on TV. I always told myself that it didn’t matter anyway, that they were secular Jews who had no interest in any religious celebrations, Chanukah or otherwise. A neighbor from next door told me that my mother spent her last Thanksgiving in the family house locked up inside. When the neighbor peeked in the window, she saw piles of dishes in the sink and garbage on the floor. “I was afraid to go in but was worried your mother would starve to death.” The neighbor left food in the milk chute, then came back later to retrieve the empty plates.
    As my mother slept, I tried to draw her face. It was my fourth attempt since I’d arrived on December 18. It had been many years since I had drawn her. When I was in high school, I stayed home on weekend nights sometimes so she wouldn’t be alone. We listened to the radio together or to records. She’d lie on the couch and smoke and I would sketch her. Now I drew her asleep and dying, head tilted back upon the pillow, her mouth open as if in song.
    I took out the drawing the doctor had made of what my mother looked like inside. It reminded me of choreography, the staging of an intricate dance. It reminded me of my own inevitable demise. There is a Buddhist meditation I do sometimes. I imagine the layers of my body as I sit, mindful of my breath. I picture my flesh falling away, then the muscles and connective tissue, the organs, and finally the bones. I do this once in a while to remind myself of where I’m going. A rather macabre way to comfort myself, I suppose. Sometimes I take it a step further, into deep time—I imagine my bones beneath the earth, crumbling to gypsum, forming into chalk held by a child writing words upon a blackboard. I imagine the words erased by another child’s hand, and still another, breathing in chalk dust, exhaling into air.
    An aide came into the room to remove my mother’s tray. She had barely touched her eggs. Little by little, we cease to consume, take in food, water, air. My sister glanced up, then jotted something down. What would she remember? What would I? Our brains are built for selective attention—we focus on some things while ignoring a vast array of other stimuli aroundus. It is those select things that we recall, not the rest. I couldn’t take notes about what was going on around me like Natalia. Just the act of taking visual and auditory information in, processing it, then writing it down, is an act of multitasking,