by Tina Kimbrell

The nurses have turned the TV in my mom’s room to a constant loop of nature images and soothing music. It reminds us of the nature documentaries that she used to watch on the Discovery Channel in the 90s. We’d make fun of her for so intently watching hours’ worth of fuzzy footage of lions hunting or grasshoppers mating or crabs side-shuffling on seafloor. There was always something eating. Always something dying. Always a family doing both together. I see her in her chair: fully reclined at the edge of a nap, covered with an afghan, cigarette dangling at the corner of her mouth. I see the ashes fall onto her shirt and her downward glance, her attempt at swiping them away just pushing them deeper into her chest.

In the hospital she mostly sleeps, half her size and unable to speak. Ventilator tube sprouting out her mouth. Every few minutes she wakes but falls right back asleep. We are animalistic in our vigilance: she wakes and we pounce into her line of vision. We are here. It is exhausting to die.

Tomorrow, we will lean against the walls of the room while the nurse turns off the machine and pulls the tube out of her throat. We will watch her body more but looking instead for the life to leave it, for her blood to stop, her skin to ashen. I will think about how this death looks nothing like what I thought a scheduled death would look like: the body does not easily give up breathing. It keeps trying long after the lungs are defunct, opening and closing the mouth, taking nothing. I will feel bad for thinking it looks like a cartoon.

But today, I am tired. My legs throb from standing at the bed. I stop watching her face and sit for the first time on the stiff couch at the edge of the room. And then I see her in my periphery, still mothering: she’s looking at me and pointing at the TV. It’s a close up of a bright pink and dew-speckled flower. A dahlia or something.

My sister says, “It’s pretty, isn’t it?” and my mom nods, her eyes slipping back into sleep.