My father lay in the shape of a crescent, his skeleton distinct, at once ancient and fetal. We were never a touchy family, but as he lay there, that's all I could do: touch him. I smoothed his forehead with my palm, my hands found the knots in the back of his shoulders and he moaned with pleasure while I rubbed the tight muscles. A few days before he died, his eyes flew open when I came in the room. He smiled with one side of his face. He was lucid and clearly happy to see me one last time.
"Hi, Dad," I said. I didn't know what else to say.
"Hello, daughter," he said, which drew tears to my eyes so fast I had to turn and rub them away. To be called "daughter" under such circumstances is an honor, indeed. His only. Forever I will be that: his daughter.
I'd gone to California with a clear purpose: to help ease his way into death and to support my mother. I had no preparation for this, except being human. I'd never been to a funeral. I'd never been at the bedside of a dying person. And this was my dad. But God was there, too, as I believe he always is when we're being most human, most present.
This is what death does: reduces us to our essences.
Most of the time, my father made no sense as he lay in rigid postures that would have been agonizing to a healthy person. When he tried to speak, his words were jumbled. Mostly he lay breathing heavily, staring at us. My mother chatted to him about her day and awkwardly tried to rub him, too. But as the time grew nearer to death, she let the small talk drop and told him how much she loved him. He struggled to sit up and his eyes grew wide one last time. He emphatically mouthed something incomprehensible.
He tried again. She looked at me.
"Listen with your heart, mom," I said. "He's saying he loves you. He loves you."
My mother nodded. Tears hung at the edges of her eyes and my father relaxed back down into the bed. As my father wasted down to his primal essence, my mother's artifice fell away, too. She stopped trying to be strong. She let herself be led. She was fully in the room as I have not seen her since I was 10 years old.
Then, before I became a teenager, my mother loved me without threat. We'd sit with our legs bent across the floor heater in our Berkeley, Calif. house, our t-shirts billowing with heat as we held them open over the grill, trying not to burn the backsides of our knees. Little did I know that as I said good bye to my dad -- the man who set the highest standard for what men should be -- I would also say hello to my mother, genuine and loving as I only vaguely remembered her being before I became a teenager.
This is why we're here: to help each other die and in that I learned to love my mother, unconditionally and to understand more deeply what it means to live. My mother used to embarrass me, which now makes me ashamed to admit. How childhood does cling. But here we were, all of us reduced by grief. And my mother is no longer a source of shame, but of compassion and even admiration. Her smile looks different; bigger, revealing her big teeth, which I never noticed until now. All the artifice fell away. And it has stayed away.
As we said good-bye to my father, there was a new connection between the rest of us -- my brother too.
My mother comes to visit for the holidays. She sits and reads by the fire. She is content, happy to be in our presence. She says things to me that I have not heard since I was 10.
"It's been such a nice visit," she says.
"It has," I say. "And I haven't been a bitch." I laugh at this, but it's true. I have been and now I am not.
"No," she says. "You are sweet."
To become sweet. This is my journey now.
