They move Mom to the Domitilla wing, into a private room where they can care for her as she dies. There is a couch to which Jim lays claim, Ted takes the lounge chair at the bedside, Rich roams the halls with his lap-top, calling banks and credit card companies and mortuaries. I begin what will be a four day migration from the extra chair to the family lounge computer to the hot, squared-off streets of Rochester where I smoke cigarettes like I never quit, years ago.

We have two rooms in a nearby hotel but spend little time there. We want to be close to Mom; Ted and Jim almost never leave her side; they sleep in the room, only go out to eat. You can tell Rich gets batty sitting there next to this shell of our mother, with her ragged, shallow breathing, and finds excuses to be out of the room. He’s doing all this logistics work and it’s a huge help, of course. Between the three of us, Ted, Jim, and I do a lot of phone-calling and up-dating with family and close friends.

Mom had been in Winona, MN when it happened. She was visiting Paul Barnes, the Creative Director at Great River Shakespeare Festival, and one of Mom’s favorite people. It was Paul who first came to her side. He’s helping us in a hundred ways, contacting folks, organizing the stuff she left at his place; he even found someone to adopt JoeJoe. When Paul founded the GRSF four years ago, he sought out Mom to help him launch the first season. He never shied from heaping praise on her and I know Mom was highly gratified by this because she, in turn, had great respect for Paul.

Leslie has set up a web-site to keep friends and family current and in touch, a fantastic move on her part. We are flooded with messages- too many to process at the moment. Serves to show how loved our mother was. It stresses us out, thinking of all the people who will be affected by her death, all the conversations we will have to have, all the contacts to make. At this moment, we are trying to focus on her and what we can do to help her. With Dad gone so long now, it’s up to us boys to take care of our mother.

I wish I was stronger for the task, but I’m shattered, reeling and unsure. I have to drink; I can’t take this straight. There are no drunken, maudlin scenes, but I feel like a kid who wants to punch his arm. It’s not that her death is all about me. I manage to be available, to be useful; there’s so much to do. It’s just that I know Mom would be sad to see me this way, wishing to vanish, wanting to give it all up and go with her, annihilating myself in spite of my better instincts. Part of me is not sure I can bear this sadness.

L. is devastated, of course. She and Mom were close; in fact, Mom considered L. my saving grace and took her part always, quite the opposite of the mother-in-law stereotype. If there was some disagreement between L. and I, Mom would lay out in no uncertain terms her opinion that it was for me to compromise. While this sometimes frustrated me, I had to respect my mother’s fairness and I know it made L. feel more comfortable in the family, more secure. Twice Mom was with us in Italy and we had such a blast. Last year, L. took an iconic photo of Mom sitting in a traghetto, crossing the Grand Canal in Venice. She’s wearing a black and white striped gondolier shirt of the type sold in tourist shops all over the city. She had taken a fancy to these shirts and decided to get one, which I found very cute. Mom was, after all, a sweet old lady in wonderful Venice, completely entranced by that weepy, cranky town with it’s crooked bell-towers and shadowy canals; she wasn’t jaded. Why not buy a tourist-y gondolier shirt and sport it proudly? Passing the ride-hawking boat-men by the little bridges, we joked that we needed no goldolier; we had Mom.

For Leslie and Ted’s wife, Alice, this has got to be torture. They loved and admired our Mother, had spent a great deal of time with her over the years. What’s more, they know what a hell their husbands are going through in these days, stuck in a far away mid-Western hospital, out of comfort’s reach. We are all hyper in touch thanks to this awesome technology, cell-phones and instant messages, attending nurses and drip machines, beeping monitors and the cable TV. It can be comforting. You are never forgotten or alone. Still, I find myself at moments floating, engulfed in a silence which no signal can pierce. It’s not even anger or sadness that I feel. There’s no sense of the tragic, no cry to the Heavens. It’s just me, surrounded and alone, cut loose entirely from my moorings.

Mom’s heart is strong. She cannot pass away easily, at least her body cannot. I wonder, where has her mind, her soul gone? For the first three nights, I sleep on the carpeted floor of the family lounge in the Domitilla Wing, arm thrown across my eyes to block the fluorescent lights which are never turned off. You can’t help but wish she’d just let go. We are bugging out in here. Every AM I eat a sad and stony biscuit in the cafeteria where nobody smiles. You never saw so many worried faces in your life. The only people who laugh are the staff, and of course you can’t blame them; it’s their job being here all day.

I go out for walks on these flat rectangles of Minnesota streets, past the brick and wooden houses, the overgrown alleys, stop in some dark-brown sports bar for a tall, watery beer and read the NFL preview mag. Mom had recently sent me a box of Brett Favre swag, the commemorative edition of Sports Illustrated and one of those full-color hagiographies. He was supposed to retire after the Packer’s near miss last year, but rumor has it he is considering a return. Mom would have found this silly.

On the fourth day, I hit the hotel for a shower and a nap on a real bed. They are having a street fair in the courtyard outside the hotel complex with a little stage for musicians. I have no interest in any of it. Waking from a shallow sleep, I hear a guitar player on the sound system, chords drifting up, disembodied, through the sealed windows of the climate-controlled room. He’s going from a major chord down to that teary relative minor, as is done in thousands of songs, singing well like a top 40 country singer. What’s the tune? All I know is that the lilt of it, the cadence and the instrumentation, which would have pulled easy tears from my sentimental mother, seems to chime and echo inside my chest with a swelling sadness I cannot bear. I can’t stand it! This song is breaking me from within!

I leap out of bed, throw on clothes and leave the room, head down to the hotel bar where it is cocktail hour. The restaurant folks are hauling in chairs and umbrellas from the terrace; a big storm is rolling up. The bar TV talks of tornado warnings. I glance out the window where a yellow sky, the color of a bruise, is boiling and churning. All the vendors, with their canopies of crap, are scrambling to tie down. A fierce wind arrives, firing individual bullets of rain against the thick glass. St. Mary’s is a mile distant and there’s no way I’m walking in this tempest. There’s nothing for it but to have a beer and stare at the weather maps on the update news.

There’s a decent, if pricey, restaurant in the downtown area by the hotel. The Olive Garden starts to pall pretty quickly, so it was essential to find a passable dinner place since we have no way of preparing food these long days of waiting. We eat together and talk and again I’m struck by how much I enjoy the company of my brothers. Mom always took pride in the fact that her sons managed to stay close over the years. Everybody is facing this nightmare in his own way, Rich by busying himself with the thousand details of Mom’s estate, Ted with his quiet vigil, Jim with his gallows humor. I feel like they all want my company, or maybe they don’t want to leave me alone too much; they can tell I’m drinking, shattered, unraveling. I’ll get through it, boys, don’t worry about me! Stevie’s tougher than you think, I hope.

Finally, on Sunday, July 13th, Mom stops breathing. Ted and I are alone in the room. Jim is at lunch, Rich is at the hotel. For an hour, she had been taking one breath and just stopping, literally for five to ten seconds, before the next one. Each is shallower, more ragged than the last. It’s a torture to hear this, absurd as well. Why should we drag her poor body along like this? I am starting to freak out and Ted is sharp with me, telling me to shut up or split if I can’t take it. He’s right, of course. I am laying on the couch with my hands over my ears as Ted calls Jim and Rich, telling them that she seems close.

In that weird decompressed silence, that anti-climactic fall of an expected passage, she is gone; the next breath does not come. We kiss her and say farewell, too wrung out now to weep. She’s so tiny and crumpled in, so wasted away, it’s not even her anymore. I had kissed her goodbye in that sunny conference room, staring at the green trees and the giant sky as they told us she would not make it. Now we must gather our detritus, our lap-tops and books and old newspapers, straighten up the room and let them take her away.