Room 1211

              Everything smelled yellow. The cancer had spread to Mom’s liver, so that’s maybe what I sensed: her sallow skin. But hovering above the sharpness of hospital bleach and bedsheets, there was also a softer smell, something heavy and warm and unpleasant that spread everywhere in the room.

              My fifteen-year-old sister was the one who found Mom seizing in her bedroom where Mom had spent much of the past couple months. Six days later, we drove back to the hospital in silence at two in the morning, street lamps throwing a faded brown onto the trees and houses around them.

              Mom had moments of lucid consciousness or sleep in those six final days of her life; other times, she bucked in a frenzy of pain, and a few times Mom spoke a strange, twisted language that made us laugh. The trick was to run enough morphine to ease the pain but low enough she was still with us. We called this dial-a-Myrna, and it felt like the choice between love and death.

              The oncology wing was on the top floor, and the window of 1211 gave an expansive view of Seattle’s thicket of buildings against the gray arm of Puget Sound. We sat on the empty second bed or a low chair and the rest of us stood, talking among ourselves and mostly leaving Mom out of it. Our laughter was louder than anything else on the floor—the black humor of Mom’s body and likely death—laughing at Mom waking up and telling Lauren to go out and play with the bananas, laughing because good friends were sitting together and this is what we did, hands on each other’s backs.

              We saved serious talk for the waiting room and once, the conference room the floor below because Mom’s directive to the physician demanded the violence of all measures, surely to burst her cancer-ridden organs in the process. Louise had slammed the table with her open palm: You don't know what it was like! You weren't there when Myrna made me promise… PROMISE! she said. Promise that you will do that for me, that you will come every day. But Myrna... PROMISE! Promise, Louise: Promise that you will visit every day and feed me ice cream and read me stories. But Myrna, it's different, you have cancer. PROMISE! she had said.

              And I was remembering Mom, her chin up and grinning, a white button blouse with green paisleys over breasts still there and her glasses dark from the sun pouring into our living room, chanting a camp song about backdoor trots: “Diarrhea. Unh! Why were you born. Unh! Death, destruction, and despair. People dying everywhere. Diarrhea. Unh! Why were you born. Unh!” I was remembering Mom folding Lauren into a hug, remembering the feel of the hug myself, like her whole body was a smile.

              In the hospital, I could feed Mom crushed ice and that’s about all I could do. Her throat was scratchy and dry like a cat’s. Down the hall a machine would grind ice in gratifying viciousness.

              I could smell decay from her pores.

              For the flake of ice on her lips, I took the cloth from the bedside table. Gently wiped her mouth. Watched her chest rise and fall with her breath. Felt my own lungs empty, and fill.