Richard arrives. Jim and I are sitting in the ICU room with Mom when he walks in. He seems like a child, expression blank and unsure, stumbling a little. Back in the day, there would have been such drama in the room with Rich, especially at a moment as devastating as this. Now he’s just fine, calm and sensible, in shock like the rest of us but holding on. Mom would be proud to see how well he handled himself.

The doctors are waiting for us all to be present before we do the conference about Mom’s situation. By their faces, you can tell what the news is. We meet in a sun-lit room with a back-side view of the hospital complex, all the rooftop units, silver conduit and new red brick. The trees are green and bursting, grass in the courtyards smoothly mowed, bulging clouds in the big blue mid-Western sky. I take a photo. This was the moment when they said she would not make it.

We see pictures of the great dark blots where her poor brain was drowned in blood. We could keep her alive but there would be no earthly point. What was Rosemary Anne Gleason Ingham is gone forever. She could only exist as a lump of helpless flesh, and Mom explicitly stated in her living will that she would not want to live this way. Anyway, we knew the woman. We know exactly what she’d say.

Now, as stated by U.S. law, we have to let her die by starvation and dehydration. She will be completely medicated, of course, but I wish we could just give her a shot and let her be. We are told the process could take days.

So we have made this awful decision and there is a weird giddiness to it. We eat dinner in a strip mall Olive Garden, talking loudly so everyone can hear us about what a bastard Bush is. You can’t just sit there and cry. We’re actually enjoying each other’s company, just like the first evening we get together at Christmas. So weird that our mother is laid out in an ICU bed, fully departed from herself. In different circumstances, we’d all be in her orbit, seeking her out in one way or another, emerging from our fraternal mix to ask her opinion, offer to help her with something, or just put an arm around her. She was the rose of all our hearts, as the song goes, and now it’s final- we will have to say goodbye.