We take off the mask and swab Mom’s mouth with ice water, not Mountain Dew, which earns us a fuss from her.

She’s tired but lucid, and we talk. Alone as a family, and then again with the doctors at her bedside.

The DNI stays.

She wants to take the mask off for good in the morning.

I make the phone calls I have to make, and then I stare at my phone for a long time before letting out a mumbled fuck it and sending a text to a number I have memorized by heart after only a month.

* * *

hey. it’s sean. i know things ended badly between us, and i know you probably have real reasons for staying away. that’s my fault, and i don’t deserve anything from you right now, but mom is coming off her ventilator tomorrow morning and i just miss you so fucking much. i keep trying to pray—for mom, for me, for everyone—but i think i’ve forgotten how.

when I try to pray, all i can hear is your voice.

* * *

Tyler’s somewhere over Illinois when Mom starts insisting on removing the mask, or “getting started” as she calls it. Overnight, she had a final X-ray and it became clear to everyone—even Aiden—that the pneumonia has her in its snowy claws; there’s barely any clear part of her lungs left. There was never going to be time for the cancer to finish eating up her insides, there was never even going to be a trip back downstairs to the regular rooms.

This was always going to be it.

It’s reassuring, in a grim kind of way. And there’s a sense of relief and levity as Mom’s care begins to transition to strictly palliative. The doctor comes in with a tender smile, going straight to Mom’s bed and holding her hand. They talk for a few minutes—the doctor taking off the mask to hear Mom’s answers—and then the doctor gives a serious nod and puts the mask back on.

The morphine is ordered and hung on the pole. Soon it will be flowing through her system enough to keep her air hunger at bay, and then we can take off the mask.

The nurses are chatty, and they ask Mom if she’d like to brush her teeth and comb her hair—and then looking at the room full of clueless men—they grin and offer to do it themselves. They bring in extra blankets, and most bizarrely, some kind of gift basket from the hospital full of Shasta soda and off-brand potato chips.

“We bring it in for every family transitioning to palliative care,” a respiratory tech explains, like it’s a door prize and not a congratulations on choosing death box filled with cheap snacks.

It’s somehow more depressing than anything else, that box. None of us touches it, and when Mom discovers there’s no Mountain Dew inside, she eyes it like it’s personally betrayed her.

They take out her NG tube, which is met with applause from everyone in the room, myself included, and then Mom wheezes something to the nurse who did it, and the nurse smiles and nods. Disappears and reappears with her purse. And with the respiratory tech’s help, they take off the mask for a few minutes at a time and put makeup on my mom’s face. Concealer and mascara. Dabs of blush and red lipstick. And after they comb and pin back a section of her hair, it’s almost the real Carolyn Bell again. Fierce and friendly and ready to laugh.

My dad bursts into tears.

The palliative care doctor gives the okay, and we take off the mask.

Mom takes a breath without it, and right away the monitors start binging and bonging, complaining noisily about her oxygen levels, but one of the nurses reaches up and mutes them. “Mountain Dew…please?” she asks, and we dispatch Ryan to go get it. Which is when I get a text from Tyler that he’s landed and he’s going to grab a cab as fast as he can.

Mom reaches for me and Dad and Aiden. “Want…to pray…”

“We can call for the hospital chaplain,” I start but she shakes her head. I notice with some dismay that there’s already a certain kind of paleness blooming around her lips and eyes.

“Don’t want chaplain,” she pants. “Want…family prayer.”

Dad, Aiden and I share a look of mutual panic.

“Babe, Tyler will be here very soon,” my dad pleads. “He can pray for you.”

“No,” she insists. “Now.” Her eyes dart to mine and there’s an urgency to them that can’t be denied—not now.

“We can pray until Tyler gets here,” I assure her. “Um. If I can remember how.”

Aiden laughs awkwardly, but I’m not actually kidding. My last successful prayer was an I hate you directed up at my bedroom ceiling, and all the times I’ve tried to pray since have slid sideways into wordlessness, a flat wall of failure. And, to be brutally, grossly honest, I almost don’t want to do it. Despite the fact that it’s her wish, despite my slowly shifting relationship with God, there’s a part of me that still balks. There’s a part of me that still thinks, I’ll do anything for my mom, but I’ll be damned before I pray.

Except, when I open my mouth, words do come out. They come out even though I’m surly, even though I’m panicked. They’re not my words, they’re thousands of years old, and at first I feel stupid, because I’ve always seen it as a sort of filler prayer, the kind you mutter while your thoughts wander away to sports and girls. But as I pray it now, each and every word feels painfully fitted to this moment, a bespoke chant of motherhood and compassion.

“Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.

Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.

Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners,

now and at the hour of our death. Amen.”

To my shock, other voices are praying with me at the end. My father and Aiden and even Ryan, hovering at the foot of the bed with his elixir of Mountain Dew.

“Perfect,” Mom says breathlessly. “Again, please?”

She doesn’t have enough air to pray it along with us, but she mouths the familiar words as we go, holding my hand tightly, and something starts to break open inside of me, something aside from the poignant pre-grief permeating the room.

I’d always thought real prayer, real religious expression, had to be unique. Individualistic. New and tailored for the person expressing it because otherwise what’s the point?

But for the first time, I feel the power of praying words alongside someone else, the power of praying words so familiar and ancient they come from some hitherto unknown part of my mind. The part of my mind that isn’t consumed with accounting and finance, the part that isn’t even rational or entirely civilized. It’s a part of me so deep, so elemental, I can’t even name it. But it responds to the old words like trees to wind, rustling awake, stretching roots deep, deep down. The words don’t care about my feelings, about my petty sulks and mortal frustrations. The words are there anyway, just as the humanness inside me is there anyway, and for one clear, shimmering moment, I understand.

I understand how you can convict God of terrible crimes and then go to evening prayer.

I understand that hate was never, ever the opposite of belief.

I understand that belief isn’t a coat to be put on and worn in all kinds of weather, even the blistering sun.

Belief is this. Praying when you don’t feel like it, when you don’t know who or what is listening; it’s doing the actions with the trust that something about it matters. That something about it makes you more human, a better human, a human able to love and trust and hope in a world where those things are hard.

That is belief. That is the point of prayer. Not logging a wish list inside a cosmic ledger, not bartering for transactional services. You do it for the change it works on you and on those around you; the point of it is…itself. Nothing more and nothing less.

We pray together, mumbling, muttering, a chorus of men praying for a woman, to a woman, about a woman. A chorus of men praying for prayers. And with each and every turn of the words, something inside me loosens and loosens. A screw unscrewing itself and falling dead to the ground, leaving nothing but a buzzing, tingling awareness in its stead.

Mom pumps my hand as we finish another prayer, and I look down at her, expecting she’ll say enough prayer, it’s Mountain Dew time, but then the door whooshes open and I’m looking up because I’m sure it’s Tyler, but it’s not Tyler.

It’s Zenny.

Zenny in her jumper, Zenny with her large dark eyes and soft loving mouth and her nose ring winking cheekily in the sunlight.

It’s Zenny, here, and I forget how to breathe.

“I don’t mean to intrude,” she says. But she doesn’t get to what she does mean to do because my mom is waving for her to come up to the bed, waving with a trembling hand and a heaving chest. The Bell men part to let her through, and Mom gestures at Zenny to lean in close, which Zenny does.

Whatever she says, she says in a stertorous whisper that I can’t make out from my position on the other side of the bed. Zenny says something back, low and musical, and my mother nods, smiles, puts a dry, gray hand to Zenny’s cheek. Another hoarse murmur, something that makes Zenny’s mouth pinch and crumple and tremble, and I watch as tears spill out of her eyes and she and my mom pull each other into a hug.

And that I can see this, just this once, the woman I love hugging my mother like she’s family—I’m speechless with it. It’s a gift I never expected to have. It’s a miracle.

Thank you.

The words flutter out, easily and without labor, flying up to the ceiling. That I would be thanking God for anything at my mother’s deathbed would have struck me as impossible a mere hour ago, but somehow it’s true and right that it’s happening now. That there would be small moments of joy tucked into this hulking, bashing loss.

Zenny straightens up, tucking some of my mom’s hair behind her ear, and for a minute I think she’s going to go, and I can’t let her. It’s selfish and horrible and a garbage thing to do, to ask her to stay here and witness this. To stay and be strong for me because I can’t be strong for myself.

I don’t care. It makes me awful but I can’t be otherwise right now. I need her, and she can leave me all she wants later, but for now—for now I need her.

I reach out for my little nun, and she doesn’t hesitate, coming to my side of the bed and sliding her arms around my waist like she belongs there, which she does. I bury my face in her hair, holding onto her like a man holds on to the edge of a cliff. And just once—it’s terrible I know, clingy and entitled and unwanted—I kiss the top of her head, letting my lips feel the ticklish brush of her curls, letting myself have that one small comfort.

When I look back to my mother, she’s looking up at Zenny and me holding each other close. My mother lays her head back and smiles, as if this were more than she could have asked for, as if her work as a mother is done. And then she wheeze-asks for the Mountain Dew, and at long last, she gets to drink it.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.