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old for diapers.
    â€œMaybe you won’t have to be a baby again,” I told her. “Maybe you’ll be a bird. You’ll fly around and look at everything from up high.”
    â€œI don’t want to be a bird,” she said.
    It’s amazing what the living expect of the dying. We expect wisdom, insight, bursts of clarity that are then reported back to the undying in the urgent staccato of a telegram: I have the answer. Stop. They’re waiting for me. Stop. Everyone who died before. Stop. And they look great. Stop. We expect them to reminisce over photos, to accept apologies and to make them, to be sad, to be angry, to be grateful. We expect them to clear our consciences, to confirm our fantasies. We expect them to get excited about the idea of being a bird.
    *   *   *
    My mother’s official date of death was December 26 but the day she actually left was December 5. This was the day her confusion morphed into unremitting delirium, the day the present tense fell away and her world became a collage of memory and imagination, a Surrealist canvas through which reality seeped in only briefly at the corners. Suddenly she seemed no longer in pain. She was mobile, even spry, and given to popping out of bed as if she’d forgotten to take care of some piece of essential business. When I walked into her bedroom that morning, a painting had been removed from the wall and clothes she hadn’t worn in months were strewn across the floor. She’d thrown up, of course, and the green-brown vomit was dribbling down her pajamas and onto the bed. Whereas the day before she’d have been flustered and embarrassed, she now seemed unfazed, unapologetic, even ecstatic. She wanted her purse, she told me. She needed to put some things in it. I recognized this impulse from my death books. Dying people often pack suitcases and retrieve their coats from the closet because they’re overcome with the idea that they’re going somewhere. My mother had a cane she used for the rare occasions when she got up—a tasteful wooden thing; she’d refused the walker sent over from the medical supply company—and now she had it in bed with her and was waving it around so it threatened to knock over the lamp and yet more pictures. When I leaned over the bed to wipe up the vomit, she put the end of the cane on my head and began rubbing my hair. She was smiling a crazy smile, her tongue hanging from her mouth like an animal’s. The gesture struck me as something an ape might do if you were sitting across from it trying to make it play nicely with blocks, a helpless molestation, a reaching out from behind the bars of a cage. When I managed to grab the cane she resisted for a moment before letting it go.
    â€œMeghan,” she said solemnly. Her voice over the last few weeks had grown faint, her speech slurred and monotone. It was the sound of fog rolling in over a life.
    â€œWhat, Mom?” I chirped. She could hear just fine but I’d taken to talking loudly, as if she were an old person who was going deaf. It drove her crazy. She was always shushing me.
    â€œWe need to figure something out here.”
    â€œWhat’s that?”
    â€œI need to ask you something.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œHow did we get kidnapped?”
    *   *   *
    The dying have their own version of dementia. They drift not only between the real and the not real, the past and the present, but also the living and the dead—and not just the dead they appear to be seeing but the dead the living want to believe they’re seeing. It’s like they’re living in six dimensions, at least two of which exist solely for the benefit of the people standing around watching and listening to them. (“Folks with dementia say the darnedest things!”) “Is that Grandpa you’re talking to?” we ask when they murmur at an empty chair. “Is there someone up there? Tell