In my mother's hospital room, I settle on a little plastic-covered reclining chair and try to drift back to sleep, but she won't be quiet. She's babbling about how guilty she feels and how sorry she is and not really meaning it because she's out of her head, and finally I growl at her, "Would you shut up! Just shut up!"

A nurse walks in at this very instant and stares at me in horror. I am rather notorious among those few who have heard this particular verbalization come from deep in the back of my throat. Emmy says, with a touch of admiration, that it is the scariest sound she's ever heard. I used it once to quiet some unruly girls on a choir trip, and she has never forgotten it. Just as it worked on the choir girls, it works on my mother, but I'm sure the nurse thinks I am an awful daughter. Yes, d.a.m.n it, sometimes I am. But Mother will never remember this transgression.

At least I get a little bit of peace. Finally it's 6:30 a.m. and I can head to the cafeteria for something to eat. My mother is finally out of it. The food offerings in a hospital cafeteria are not particularly appetizing; I get some scrambled eggs and a biscuit and sink down in a booth in the deserted room. I'm mechanically ingesting the food when my cell phone buzzes. It's Hank.

"h.e.l.lo?" I say.

"Yeah, I've called the paramedics and need to know which hospital to go to," he says.

"Come again?"

"My blood pressure has skyrocketed, and I feel bad. I'm all shaky. The paramedics are on their way and I'm probably going to have to go to the hospital. Which one do I go to?"

"Good Lord. Go to the one in Pineville," I tell him. It's not the same hospital where my mother is, but she has a different insurance policy than we do. "I'll come by on my way to school." I spend the day bouncing from one hospital to the other and somehow manage to teach my cla.s.ses as well.

Hank comes home that night with a list of different doctors to see. My mother, on the other hand, spends ten days in the hospital and is much worse at the end of those ten days than when she went in. She's had a colonoscopy and every kind of test known to humankind, but they can find nothing seriously wrong with her. She is simply old and the plumbing doesn't work anymore. But now she's caught infections and something has gone really wrong with her brain. She seems to be in such misery that I actually wish for her death. She can't understand why she is still alive. And I am helpless to do anything for her.

"This is so awful," she says over and over.

One of the nurses insists that he has to give her the full dose of morphine that the doctor has prescribed, which is nuts. The morphine has sent her into another dimension. She doesn't need that much, I try to tell him. You can give less than the doctor orders, just not more. This isn't penicillin, for G.o.d's sake. It's morphine. I manage to win this battle but something bad has happened to my mother's brain.

She is somehow still alive at the end of this ordeal. The hospital, however, is through with her. They've done their worst, and now it is time for her to leave. She is heading back to the nursing home where she was last year. But now the insurance rules have changed and I'm looking at the possibility of a bill that will make me a pauper. Still, there is no choice. And no matter what, I'm going to Mexico in another week.

I visit her every day at the nursing home and stay for hours. She has infections. She can no longer form complete sentences. She spends a half hour trying to tell me about her problem with the telephone. There is no phone. In spite of her condition, I am determined not to cancel my trip to Mexico. My brother Jo and his girlfriend come to Charlotte to relieve me of my duties. I get on a plane and I am gone.

In Mexico I sleep a lot. Hal and Lynda live in a beautiful five-story apartment. Each story consists of a single room. I am ensconced on the bottom floor on a futon mattress. It's comfortable. I am surrounded by books, and I lose myself for hours in someone else's words, someone else's woes.

In San Miguel Vitamin D is plentiful, church bells ring often and randomly, dogs bay, pigeons worry about the sheen of their feathers, and bread smells slide over the balcony ledge to place a calming hand on my shoulder.

In Charlotte my life is a litany of despair. Hank and I lie next to each other trading our tales of woe, calculating the calories of grief in our daily diet. My mother can no longer defecate, I tell him. Hank counters that his father's brain is riddled with cancer like Swiss cheese. And then we list the others gone or going-his sister, my friends, his coworker, my professor. We are paralyzed, and only our tongues can move obsessively, tolling the bad news.

In San Miguel de Allende I don't tell Lynda the details of my life. This is not a conscious decision, but simply a response to the unwritten code of Paradise. Leave those s.h.i.t-filled diapers back in the nursing home. Do not defile the sanct.i.ty of this crystalline dream with the tales of your endless tears.

In Charlotte my colleagues at school wheel toward me, their faces compositions of concern when I enter our wing of cubicles. They know that I am a bloodied soldier. I don't volunteer a lot but I am not p.r.o.ne to lying either. "Fine" is no longer part of my vocabulary. I keep the bulletins short. My coworkers nod sympathetically, realizing that sympathy is pointless. It does nothing, and "talking about it" provides no relief.

Lynda is my mentor/soul sister/friend and literary mother. Hal is her cranky but kind poet husband, who adores her. Lynda and I talk only about books. A salve on my blistered psyche. This is what sympathy would enviously love to be. I realize in a rare moment of self-satisfaction that I have chosen my friends well. This kind of friendship is not earned. It is a kind of grace. A friendship administered so gently it doesn't infect you. This friendship helps you become light, light as that vermilion flycatcher tossing about on the currents of air, barely clinging with its clawed toes to the topmost cedar branch. I want to be lighter still, like the quiet haze resting on the hills, pale and almost empty, absorbing smoke, filtering sunlight, nestling an insubstantial cheek on a warm white wall.

San Miguel de Allende is every gringa's dream: cobblestone streets, galleries, parks, crimson birds flitting about in branches of gargantuan trees. I eat well, I read voraciously, I watch the Oscars with Lynda and Hal and their friends. We meet writers and artists. At a lovely outdoor garden restaurant, while an insipid musician croons Jimmy Buffet songs, a poet flirts with me, and I flirt back. We meet a sculptor and his painter wife, who invite us to come by for drinks and marijuana, of all things. We decline. Once as we are walking, Lynda and I stop to read a sign listing upcoming twelvestep meetings. One is for s.e.x and love addicts.

"That used to be me but not anymore," Lynda says. "Disgusting."

And we laugh till the tears stream down our cheeks. Our s.e.xfilled stories and voracious concupiscent characters bound us together when we first met. But things change, don't they? And we can't help but lapse into hilarity at the notion of our old voracious selves.

I could stay here, I'm thinking, and never go back. Then my cell phone rings insistently. It's Hank.

"I'm in the hospital in Atlanta," he says.

I'm silent.

"I was in the airport waiting for my connection, and my blood pressure spiked again. I don't think I can handle this thing with my parents."

Hank is supposed to be going to California to work with a TV company on the LA Marathon and then stay and take care of his dad while his mother goes into the hospital for a perforated colon.

"Call me when you get to California," I tell him.

The next day he calls again.

"You need to come to California. My blood pressure is. .h.i.tting the roof. My dad is probably dying and my mother has got to go to the hospital. Dad refuses to go to hospice."

No, I'm thinking, I need to go home. I need to get back to my own mother. She can't be alone in that place after my brother leaves. But really, there is no question, no debate here. Hank has not asked for a lot these past years. And now he needs me. My heart is resolute. My mother will have to cope without me. I am going to California. The company that hired Hank has offered to pay for my ticket.

The next day I am flying into Los Angeles with Arlo Guthrie's voice in my head: "Bringing in a couple of keys." Yeah, I'm thinking, a key to my house and one to my mom's. That's all the keys I've got.

When Hank picks me up at LAX, we have a short reprieve. His mother is not going into the hospital for a couple of days and the company he works for has booked him a room at the Sheraton Universal. That night we wander over to Universal City in search of food. What a culture shock after the sweet naturalness of San Miguel. It's like a sensory rape, like entering a comic book world, like a funhouse on steroids. IMAX cinemas! Mechanical bull riding! Bungee dives! Fun dining!

We get out as quickly as possible to head to downtown Burbank, which has, of late, become the trendiest place on the planet. Throngs of teenagers and tourists spill over the streets. But it's downright mellow after Universal City. We wind up in a Thai restaurant where the plates are square and black and the food is, let's face it, superb.

It's comforting to be with him. We don't talk much. We don't need to. We know each other so well. Somehow my presence helps settle his blood pressure, and I feel calmer around him, too. Though we have our fights over money and politics, we also enjoy each other's company. Briefly we can forget about everything else and be the same two people we were twenty-five years ago when our biggest worry was where we would eat dinner that night and what kind of wine we would get.

The next day we head down behind the Orange Curtain to La Brea. We enter the maw of h.o.m.ogeneous corporate America and find a world of identical chain stores and restaurants, beckoning us to eat and buy. Hank's parents live in a ranch house in a manicured subdivision. His father retired in his forties and spent his days playing golf, watching television, and listening to talk radio. That life is over.

Hank Senior is back in the bedroom when we get there. When I see him, I am floored. His head is swollen with fluid and he cannot stand without a walker. The last time I saw him-six months earlier-he looked the same as he always had, same trim, compact body and head full of dark hair. He didn't look like he was approaching eighty. He looked like he'd just qualified for Social Security.

"It's the chemo," Jean tells us.

The next day she has to check into the hospital and she's worried about the "prep" medicines she has to take-with good reason. They wipe her out. No way can she help Hank Senior to the bathroom. Suddenly my Hank is their caretaker, helping one parent and then the other. The look on his face is of a man in a war zone, and I'm reminded of the one time we went to Nicaragua. We were exploring Managua, which was not such a smart thing to do after dark, and we realized a car was slowly following us as we walked along the darkened streets. We knew we were in danger, but we didn't panic. We headed straight for the hotel like we were on a mission and somehow we made it back to our lonesome bottles of rum unscathed.

I try to help, but mostly I'm there for moral support.

The next day, Hank's duties have changed. Hank and his brother have finally convinced Hank Senior he needs to go to hospice. They take him to the same house where their sister died just a few months earlier. Jean is now in the hospital, getting ready for surgery. And with the immediate caregiving crisis over, Hank and I find ourselves alone in the house.

And this time we panic. We are not supposed to be alone in this house. This house is supposed to be filled with people, with the smell of cooking foods, with the sounds of television and radio. We aren't even supposed to be in this house at this time of year. Where are the two children? Where is the dog we usually bring? Neither of us can swallow. Breathing becomes difficult.

I'm remembering one Christmas before Beth got sick. On Christmas Eve I sat down with Jean as she opened up the cupboards of the past and hauled out one family member after another, showing me pictures and mementos. She told me about the six children from Russia, the eight who were born here, the aunt who was a dwarf, and the uncle who died of rheumatic fever when he was seventeen.

The next day after the ritual gorging on gifts and before the ritual gorging on food, Hank and I left the house for a walk. We cut down an alley behind perfectly landscaped lawns and up a hill into a meadow.

"This is the old way to the high school," Hank said. We wandered along a fence beside the football field and into the woody edge of a golf course. We cut over and wound up inside a cemetery where we lingered, reading rows of plaques bearing remote dates: 18441910 and 18511904. I found myself reading the first names as we walked down the long rows-Margaret, Stella, Effie, Walter, Grazella, Charles, and John. Above the names were the words father, mother, husband, or sister.

As I gazed over the grounds at the hundreds of simple plaques on the ground, I felt as if I were watching a parade that had been going on forever. All these people, I thought. All these laughing, loving, lying, hating, working, eating, and finally dying minds and bodies. All those souls, all those now-silent voices. My mother has often said she wonders where the music goes when we can no longer hear it. Those vibrations are still traveling somewhere.

It's an old, old truth that seems to lie in wait for us like the tree we never notice until it falls down in our path. It seems that we must acknowledge every once in a while that we are only visiting here and briefly at that.

Now Beth's ashes are lodged in that same cemetery, and Hank Senior's time is short. Hank and I stare at each other in the empty house like two lost and abandoned children.

"We have to get out of here," I tell him. Everything about this house, the couch where we're sitting, the coffee table where we played Clue, the two recliners where his parents always sat, the dry black hole of the fireplace, everything is a reminder of all we once had. And it wasn't long enough. There just wasn't enough time.

"Here, take this," Hank says, handing me half a Xanax. So I do. The grief lifts briefly, and we get on about our business, visiting one parent and then the other, eating dinner with Steve, and then back to visit a parent.

The most poignant moment is when Jean is talking to her husband, her high school sweetheart, on the phone in the hospital while he is at hospice.

"You take care of yourself," he tells her.

"I will," she says. "I'll see you soon."

At the hospice house, I sometimes pick an orange from the tree in the backyard. Hank Senior is not the only one dying here. A few very quiet people sit in the living room or stay in their beds. The women work hard, cleaning these broken bodies, feeding them, making them comfortable. Their activity keeps the place from feeling morose. Business as usual, people living, people dying.

Jean's surgery goes well, and she comes back home. It's time for me to go home as well. While I was gone, Emmy was sick with the flu and I was not there to take care of her. My mother was alone in the nursing home and I wasn't there for her either. But they both survived without me.

I hug Hank goodbye at the airport. He is staying with his mother for a while as she recovers. The sky picks me up from the ground and tosses me over the continent.

Morning. I drive to the nursing home where my mom is in rehab. Her body is a crumbling house. Her mind is worse. It is nine thirty when I walk through the corridor to her room. I find her lying in bed, whimpering.

"What's wrong, Mom?" I ask. "What's wrong?"

She has no answer, and I realize I am once again asking the wrong question. Somehow I a.s.sumed there was something I could fix if only she'd tell me what. But it is obvious I have made a misstep. I should not ask questions. I need to bring answers.

"There's nothing wrong," I tell her. "There's nothing wrong, Mom."

I turn to lower the volume on the TV, which I brought from her apartment. She keeps whimpering as I fiddle with the controls. The whimpering is an insistent tug on my consciousness, making it impossible to focus.

"Stop it," I say, glancing back at her, but my voice is gentle. She closes her mouth in compliance.

"Now, why aren't you dressed yet, I wonder? Do you want to get dressed, Mom?"

"I don't know. I don't know what I want to do," she says, clutching her hospital robe. "I can't tell if it's day or night."

I glance at her rolling table and see that her breakfast is mostly gone.

"Mom, look out the window. See, it's daylight, and you've just had breakfast, so it must be morning, right?" An azalea bush waves a meager bloom on the grounds outside.

"Yes, yes. You're right." Her voice relaxes. She lets go of the gown.

Actually, she is far more coherent than she was before I left. And the infection she had earlier is gone. Her breathing is better. Once again, she has peeked into the abyss and beat a retreat.

"I wonder if I should dress you. Maybe they're going to clean you up first."

I go out to find a nurse's a.s.sistant.

"Has my mother been cleaned up?"

"No, not yet," she says. She's headed into someone else's room.

"Then I'll do it," I answer. She directs me to the clean towels and washcloths, but the closet is empty so I get some clean ones out of the laundry room. It doesn't take long to know where everything is, to feel like one of the staff.

Back in my mother's room, I gently wash her back with the warm, soapy washcloth. I wipe down her arms and armpits and bring the washcloth under her soft shapeless b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Neither of us is self-conscious about it. I once nursed at those b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Can there be a more intimate bond?

I dress my mother in a green dress with long sleeves, but then I discover that her diaper has not been changed. It is thick and musty with pee, so I change the diaper, promising myself I will be more vigilant about the care she gets in this place.

I am lodged on twin peaks of grief. Emmy is away at school, growing up, growing away from me, on her way to a new life. And my mother has taken one step closer to death. I know I have to empty out her apartment. She'll never come back to this place. I have no idea where she'll go, but in the meantime I need to pack her things for storage. Alone in her apartment with the piano like a black accusation, a claustrophobic agony slips a pair of thick hands around my rib cage. I rush outside, gasping for air. I find the shelter of my car but the sobs are shaking me like an angry parent. I call my brother, Jo, and I cry and can't stop for a long time.

TWO.

SPRING 2008.

We celebrate my mother's ninetieth birthday in the nursing home: Emmy, who is home for spring break, my two brothers, and me. We sit at a little square table in the dining room. It's a shabby place, but we have it to ourselves except for the occasional staff person who walks through to the kitchen. I think the last time we were all together was when I was four months pregnant with Emmy. We had all gone to spend Christmas at my mother's house in Edenton. For some reason she was living in the parish house and it was big enough for all of us and then some. What I remember is snow on the ground and tromping through the small town with Jo after David and his family left. Funny how families form and reform little alliances. That year David was constantly bickering with his wife, and Mom was a bag of worry. As a music director and orchestra conductor she was used to being in control, but we rolled out of her reach like marbles on a polished floor. Not to mention that I was pregnant and unmarried.

"I'm tired of being the mother," she said.

Today we are all in alliance. I've brought a cake. David takes pictures with a fancy new digital camera, Jo smiles his beatific smile, and Emmy brings that light laughter with her as always. Our mother is so happy to be surrounded by her children. The scrambled jigsaw pieces of my mother's mind now seem to be able to form half a picture of the world. I have taken her to a neurologist, who treated her like she was moron instead of a brilliant woman with brain damage. We still don't know if she's had a stroke-or if her mental state is just the result of the effects of the medicine. What I don't know yet is just how long it takes for medicine to leave an old person's system. When I was a young druggie, I needed a fix every day.

Early the next morning Hank calls me.

"My dad is gone," he says.

"Are you okay?" I ask.

"I've been to the hospital twice to try to get this blood pressure under control," he says.

"I'm sorry about your dad. Is your mom okay?"

"Yeah. Yeah, we'll be fine." I take this to mean they've gone into coping mode.

There will be no funeral for Hank Senior. He will be cremated and his ashes placed in the cemetery next to Beth. We will each need to grieve in our own way. How am I going to tell Emmy? For a moment I feel sorry for myself that I have to be the bearer of the bad news-once again. She'll know, of course, by the sound of my voice. And she can read my face like a text message. Besides, she's had practice in bad news. When I had to tell her that her G.o.dmother Kitty died, she wailed in agony and shook for hours. Grief like that stunned me. I suppose I had learned at an early age to zip up my feelings. But Emmy never did that, and she's better off for it.

Later that morning I am in my office at the computer. Emmy comes in and sits on the floor.

"Hi!" she says, cheerful as a little goldfinch.

I wheel around and look at her.

"I have to tell you something."

Her smile drops. Her eyes darken. She is on high alert.

"What?"

"It's Grampa," I tell her. There's no way to do this gently. "He died this morning."

She is not expecting this. We probably should have told her how serious things were, but she was away at school and we didn't want to burden her with that heartache without one of us there.