The palms of my hands were sweating as I walked down the long corridor. I stopped just long enough to wipe them on the front of my jeans again. I've never been known to lag behind, but today I was glad to let my sister Lizzy take the lead. Our footsteps beat out a unified march on the linoleum floors, echoing off the naked walls. The antiseptic smells of rubbing alcohol and pine cleaner lingered in the air as we passed by rooms with their doors ajar. Halfway down the hallway, I began looking into each one.

Some were strewn with flowers and visitors, some with only the hushed monotone of TV sets to keep the patients company. The onset of dusk carved shards of sunlight through the mini blinds in the windows. The dust that danced in the glow cast an eerie fog across the beds. A few of the rooms had the doors closed, and I wondered if that meant they were vacant or if their inhabitants were in such a state that they ought not to be viewed by insensitive rubber-neckers like myself.

The phone call which brought me here came from my mother's neighbor earlier in the day. She wouldn't say much, other than that my mother had fallen and an ambulance was on the way. Oh God, I thought, was she drunk? Surely not this early. Although the cocktail hour had steadily moved up my mother's living room clock over the last three decades, I couldn't believe she would be drinking before noon. Had she broken a hip? I fast-forwarded the movie running through my mind to a future of my overweight mother trying to lumber around her small apartment in a wheelchair. There she would sit, mixing concoctions of wine and pills to ease her pain. I also contemplated the cruel probability that I would be the one to care for her.

I looked at the back of Lizzy's long, wiry hair as she moved swiftly down the halls. I knew Lizzy would never care for our mother. There was too much unfinished business between them. Besides, Lizzy was always the flighty one. Lizzy had perfected a master status as unreliable and easily distracted. I wondered now if that wasn't a shrewd maneuver on her part, carefully calculated for this moment. No, it would be up to me to care for mom.

As Lizzy rounded the corner into Room 212, I paused for just a moment. Although I didn't know what to expect, I knew what not to. There would be no visitors. There would be no flowers or cards. My mother had long since cut off any ties to relatives and did not make friends easily. She would be alone.

Beyond Lizzy I saw a crisp white sheets and a tattered blanket pulled up on a frail woman with gray hair and yellow, leathery skin. As the woman opened her large eyes, I thought how they looked strangely out of place on her small face. This woman was near death, fragile and unimposing. This couldn't be my mother.

My mother had aged decades in a few brief months. There were no traces of bruising, leading me to believe she hadn't fallen at all, but was in this bed for other reasons. Almost a hundred pounds lighter than when I saw her last, the skin hung from her skeleton like linens on a clothesline. Even the whites of her eyes weren't. They had taken on the same yellow hue as her teeth and skin. Involuntarily I shuddered and backed slowly out of the room, bumping into the doorjamb on my way out.

Once again in the hall I tried in vain to catch my breath. A nurse was saying something to me, but I couldn't hear her over the pounding in my ears. "I said, 'are you all right dear?'," the nurse repeated. I nodded and looked for a place to sit down. It seemed like hours passed before Lizzy came to look for me, but according to my watch it has only been minutes.

"Wow," Lizzy said, "doesn't even look like mom, does it? Are you going back in?"

"Yeah, I guess so," I said, swallowing hard.

Though it was now almost dark outside, the halls of the hospital seemed unnaturally bright. Fluorescent lights cast ghoulish green on the nurses' faces as they changed metal lids from half-eaten meals they were collecting. I pulled my sweater tightly around my waist as I walked into the room.

"Hi mom, how're you feeling?" Before the last word left my mouth, I mentally kicked myself. What a stupid question.

Her crepey eyelids fluttered a little as she opened them. She stared at me for a minute as if she was trying to place me, "'Wanna cigarette." Though not exactly poignant dialogue, I was oddly relieved that there were her first words to me. I'm not sure what I would have done, had mom decided to offer up death bed confessions about her life just then. It was easier this way, familiar.

"You can't smoke in here," I scolded. I'd read about the phenomenon when parents and their children exchange roles, but I never considered it an eventuality with us. Never one to relinquish control, I wondered if mom felt the same sense of irony. Perhaps she had more on her mind, what with dying and all.

Not knowing what to do or say, I took her hand.

As the coldness of hers melted into the warmth of mine, I felt the stirrings of a floodgate, but without the requisite tears. I wasn't fighting them, they just never formed. In my family one didn't indulge in tearful scenes. So with my emotions in check, I studied her hand. Although the nails were now thick and yellow and the skin somewhat translucent, I remembered this hand well.

It was the hand that balanced a glass of wine and a cigarette simultaneously while she lay on the couch pontificating. It was the hand that slapped me soundly at the slightest provocation. And it was the hand that once enveloped mine at Disneyland. I realized with a start that I knew more about this hand that I ever knew about its owner. I didn't know this woman at all.

From the time I was able to figure out my role in the emotional food chain of my family, I knew that this was never the life she planned. She never told me her dreams, but I knew this wasn't it. And I knew enough to leave it alone. When I left home, more than one door could be heard locking behind me. Our time was done. Her job was done.

She was sleeping now. The raspy heaves from her emphysemic lungs had taken on a steady rhythm. The white crust that had formed around her lips made a whistling sound as she exhaled.

And I felt repulsed.

But the sick feeling creeping up my body was more from the shame I felt over my reaction to her rather than the actual state she was in. I knew she was dying, but I didn't know what I was supposed to do.

Lizzy appeared from a nearby waiting room with a cup of coffee. It would never have occurred to Lizzy to get one for me. She just didn't think that way. It wasn't so much that she was inconsiderate as self-absorbed. We stood there for an awkward moment, neither of us knowing what to say next. If ever there was a time for epiphanies, this would have been it. Unfortunately, nothing came to mind.

I don't remember driving home that night. I thought I might cry in the halls of the hospital, but I didn't. I thought I would break down in the car but I didn't. Numbness cocooned me and fortressed any possibilities of a wayward outburst as I moved mechanically toward my destination.

It was just past 8:00 when I put the key into the front door. As I heard the familiar sounds of the tumblers turning and the dead bolt retreating, I also heard the phone ringing from inside. Reaching for it, I fumbled in the darkness, tripping over the vacuum I left only hours and what seemed like a lifetime ago. On the other end of the line, a matter-of-fact voice was telling me that my mother had died.

"I understand," I said, though I didn't. I don't know if one ever understands death or its ramifications. I stood there wishing I had said more to my mother at the hospital. I hadn't even told her I loved her. I'm sure it would have sounded clumsy, but I knew that was what one ways at times like these.

As a little girl, I used to pretend I was someone else's child. Other moms didn't slur their words when I went to sleep-overs. They acted the same way after dark that they did during daylight. And they talked to their daughters, about everything and nothing. In retrospect I suppose my mother and I shared a dance of unspoken communication, if not outright conversation.

Mom used to doodle. Next to her car keys and loose change was a pad that sat on a wooden table by the back door. She used it to write her grocery list, but mostly she just doodled on it. When the wine made her sleepy, I'd sneak downstairs and take the coins laying there. I would always pause just long enough to observe her latest doodle and add something to it. Sometimes it was to finish a line she had started to draw, and sometimes it was more detailed. Oftentimes there would be a stick figure missing a limb or hair, as if she'd gotten distracted and left the poor soul a bald amputee. I never imagined she wanted him that way, so I'd give him some hair and a leg, and throw in a hat for good measure. I'm sure she missed the money but she never mentioned it, or the doodle addition. If I'd known that this was to be my mother's last day I might have asked her about the doodles.

Mom never said what she wanted done with her remains in the event of her death, so I decided to have her cremated. With a sense of dread, I drove to the crematorium to pick up her remains. Pulling into a parking space, I looked at the address again on the crumpled paper in my hand, and back to the building. It wasn't what I expected at all. I had envisioned a chapel-like setting on a pastoral expanse of lawn and flowers. What was before me was a metal-sided warehouse in an industrial park.

Opening the heavy door, I was greeted by an old man and the pungent smell of mildewed carpet. There were no windows and the air felt thick. The walls were covered in red-flocked wallpaper, a fitting canvas for the framed display of pithy sayings about the after-life. I wondered to myself if this ever offended the families of atheists. On the mahogany coffee table sat a small white cardboard box, with the words "Randolph, Lee" hastily scrawled on the side in the black marker. It looked minute against the massive size of the table, like a piece of lint on a dark winter coat. Given its size and the poor construction of the box, I now regretted not paying the extra fee for an urn. Tentatively I lifted the box. I raised it up and down a little to gauge its weight and to see if I could tell how full it was, more out of curiosity than disrespect. The old man who greeted me mumbled, "I'm sorry for your loss" in a barely audible voice.

"Thank you," I said, trying to fashion a polite smile. Tucking the box under my arm, I walked to my car. The rain was coming down in sheets. As I opened the passenger door, I realized I hadn't thought of where to put it. The floor seemed unfitting, as did the trunk, so I gently sat the box upright in the passenger seat, absently securing the seat belt around it. I started the engine and turned my windshield wipers, silently cursing myself for procrastinating on replacing the blades.

Without music to distract me, I allowed my mind to wander back to a time when my mother drove us to school on rainy days. The bus couldn't make it down our winding road when it rained, so she'd be forced to either drive us to school or suffer the consequences of being saddled with two kids for the day. Oh, she'd be furious that she had to get out of bed at such an ungodly hour to make her way through the flooded streets to deposit her cargo. She said she wasn't a morning person.

"Shotgun!" I'd yell running to the car.

"No fair! It's my turn," Lizzy would complain, although in the end she'd climb into the back set and pout for most of the drive.

We never spoke on the way to school; mom said it annoyed her and took her concentration from the road. During the half hour ride to school, I'd look out the window and watch as the rain plastered maple leaves like paper mache to the foggy windows of the car.

As I accelerated to merge with traffic on the main highway, my focus was suddenly snapped back to the present. Laid out before me was a blanket of red taillights quickly closing the gap between my car and theirs. Stomping on the brakes with both feet, I felt the tires grab and then release the asphalt beneath me, as I began to lose control. The cars around me spun in a steely gray blur. The panic that overtook me was similar to the feeling of being caught under a wave at the beach, when you can't tell which way is up. I careened into the guardrail before finally coming to a stop on the shoulder.

I don't remember how long I sat there, listening to the raindrops beating on the hood of my car. The imminent danger had passed, but I was still shaking, unable to compose myself. Tears stung at my eyes as I realized what I had done as I began to lose control. Instinctively I had thrown my right arm in a karate-type move, landing my hand across the box containing my mother's remains. It was just as my mother had done on those rainy days when someone had stopped short in front of us. I looked down at my own hand, and for the first time realized how much it looked like my mom's.

I put on my blinker and merged back into traffic on my way home. "I love you mom," I said into the quiet.

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