It’s all Chiara, all the time.

Something she used to do was talk on the phone to her friends for hours at a time. A big old whitish-beige-y phone console, the cord stretched across the room, and her body, years and year away from cancer, stretched over her bed. Like a fifties schoolgirl, which she had been, and an eighties mom,…

Mom, I’m thinking a lot about Ferguson lately. There have been protests and boycotts and there’s a candlelight vigil for Mike Brown tomorrow, here in Wellington, on the other side of the world from Missouri. I want to talk to you about race and ethnicity. I want to talk to you about whiteness. Mom, I…

In the dream she leaned out over me, as if I were lying down in a bed. She had her short grown-in cancer haircut, but she could smile and talk, without confusion or pain. Her shoulders were bare, her skin glowing. (Had she just come in from a beach walk?). I was surprised to see…

For her anniversary last Monday I didn’t light candles or write a letter. I didn’t go to the sea by myself, as I’d halfway thought I would do. I went snorkeling at Shelly Bay with a school group through my volunteer gig and had lunch at an outdoor cafe and didn’t mention it to anyone.…

It’s almost a year since my mother died. I keep thinking of it as her ‘anniversary’ but it’s difficult to know if it’s hers or if it’s ours: mine and my sister’s, my brother-in-law’s, my nephew’s. All her family and friends, her next door neighbour she went on walks with, her co-teacher she worked with…

I don’t remember how long I’d been there: maybe only a few weeks. It was two or three or four in the morning when the staff at the Place came in on their regular checks and I didn’t completely wake up until one of them came back out of her room and said, almost casually,…

I must have caught the tail end of the dream just as I was waking up, because my first thought was “I will have to get a flight to Tampa.” My second thought was “Oh! Oh I thought she was dead. I thought she had died. What a terrible dream!” My third thought wasn’t a…

It’s going by quickly. I went to New York to see family and friends and to be very cold, and now I’m in California (the part where it is also very cold), currently sitting in bed and reading about gun control in the wake of the latest school shooting and wondering whether I have enough…

“Based on my experience, she’s holding back. Something is unfinished. You need to tell her it’s okay to let go! She’s worried about you! Just tell her! Tell her to let go! Don’t keep her here! Tell her! Tell her! Tell her!” –Our least favourite hospice night nurse, the night before it happened. “Wow. Your…

I was with her when she drifted away from us early Sunday morning. I did not, at first, know what I was seeing: there were some short sharp shallow breaths, and then there weren’t. “Take her vitals,” I said, “take her vitals.” It wasn’t until the night nurse unfastened the oxygen tube that I understood…

I’m so sorry your mum is drifting away from you, a friend from Wellington emailed me last night. When I read that I thought about when we first moved to the island, how Mom used to go swimming in February. A couple of years later she was as thin-blooded as any native South Floridian, but…

The first few times I gave it I treated it like it was battery acid, scrubbing my hands anxiously after each syringe. “We want to be conservative about pain medication,” I’d said, stupidly confident five weeks ago, “until it becomes necessary.” Hospice has insisted on sending nurses to stay here with us for the past…

She sleeps most of the day, now, and most of the night. Today she opened her eyes for breakfast and could use a straw but by lunchtime that was all over and she was drinking mochaccino smoothie spoonful by spoonful again. It’s Election Day and in between the bed bath and the pills and the…

Deal with it by coming off as really robotic. Dodge the well-meaning hugs of strangers (because that’s all there is in this part of Florida for you, strangers and family) and raise your eyebrows crisply and politely whenever anyone coos “Oh it must be SO HARD for YOU GIRLS because it’s YOUR MOM and it’s…

I sent my absentee ballot in today. Several months ago, in Wellington, I had registered as a Tampa resident, and got my documents emailed to me several weeks ago, back when I was still going to band practice and to my job. I’d been planning to exercise one of my democratic rights via the medium…

We’ve decided Mom will stay here for The Duration, and so I sleep on the couch, the same one she had on the island in March. She’s had it for years. It’s a terrible couch—too short, too squishy, and just generally unpleasant, but it lets me be here with her every day and every night.…

Her voice is heavy and hoarse now, as if she’s been screaming at the top of her lungs at a very loud live stadium show. Sometimes the words she speaks in this voice—their order, their pronounciation, their inclusion in the English language—make sense to me, and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes she looks me in the…

Her speaking style, now, is hard to describe or imitate. It sounds like her, sort of, but there are so many little things that are not quite right. She mixes up her pronouns. There’s a lot of ummmms, a lot of uhhhhhs. I’m home sick today but I called her this morning as usual, skyping…

She’s in Tampa now, in The Place. (Mom calls it ‘the nursing home,’ which it isn’t, but I have to call it The Place). My sister is handling everything brilliantly: the move and the first parts of the transition (there will be many more) and the first visit to the cancer center up there, the…