With this three-part series RealTALK inaugurates a dedicated space for LA writers who tell good stories. jill Wright is a widely published poet and writer. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize. She lives in the Hollywood Hills.

Letter to my great grand—daughter, to be born in 2029. Letter to be opened in 2058.

Darling One,

Just in case. Just in case you never get to live a life like this—here’s what it is like to be alive Dec. 21, 2007, on a late, sunny afternoon in the Hollywood Hills.

I’m sitting at my kitchen table. It is a wide, scuffed wooden table painted white, covered with a bright blue and white flowered table cloth from the 1950’s. There are two huge bowls of fresh fruit sitting in front of me. One is a cobalt blue bowl piled high with ripe pears and crisp organic Fuji apples—their white flesh sweet and sharp—I will make crust less apple pie with them for Christmas.

The other bowl is filled with Ojai Pixies—small sweet oranges, with soft skins that peel off easily leaving the flesh to separate into global sections and pop glistening and tangy into your mouth.

Beside this second bowl is a little green honey pot with a ceramic leaf lid. A white glass spoon slides into a slot on the lid. Occasionally I lick this spoon, after I put honey in my tea—but that’s our secret. The honey is from the desert, Mesquite honey, dark gold, rich thick liquid that streams velvet sugar across my tongue.

Honey is, of course, a magical substance used all the way back to the Egyptians to prolong and sweeten life. We have heard there is a virus threatening the bee hives, that thousands of hives have just gone mysteriously empty. No one can say exactly why or how this virus works. But it is worrisome. Albert Einstein once wrote that if the bees go extinct, all other life on earth will only survive for four years. Many of us have been praying for the bees and planting bee friendly flowers in our gardens.

On the other side of the bowl of Ojai Pixies, there is an Amethyst vase with huge pink stargazer lilies, and a Chinese porcelain blue and white bowl, filled with salad greens, and chunks of goat cheese. Lunch.

I like my salad with lemon, olive oil, small cherry tomatoes, not sweet but musky tart—and slivers of wet cool English cucumber. Yum. I eat salad every day, sometimes twice.

The rain has come this week and washed away the smog. We pray that it will come again and again, staving off the drought for another year. Water is not yet rationed, but we filter it before we drink it.

I can see my garden from where I sit. The thick trunks of bougainvillea wrap the white wooden railings of the porch, their magenta flowers still shimmering with life.

And the light—ah the light! I have attempted to describe California winter light many times. It is golden, clear, palpable, enveloping, soft, yet crisp as toast, ah yes, three fresh loaves of bread sit on my sideboard, two of them Bopkas, one sweet with dark chocolate and one layered with apples and cinnamon. The third is a garlic loaf from La Brea Bakery. La Brea is an artisanal bakery that we all love. We have tried to revive the Craft and artisan ways of our ancestors to redeem us from the noise, stress, pollution, electronic trances, diseases, and the knowledge of all the other destructive things that we have made.

We comfort and balance ourselves with knitting, painting, hand-finishing wood, growing gardens, baking. This saves our humanity if not the planet. I do a bit of embroidery but mostly, I write. I write poetry nearly every day and craft it into small books for my own press. Smooth rocks, trees in the wind, mesquite honey, hummingbirds, spiders, liquid soap, colored pencils, and your great grandfather’s long legs speak poetry to me. I imagine the poems as nests, holding the fragile eggs of what I feel for this life. I am in love with life, perhaps you have guessed this. And I hope you are too.

From where I sit, I can see the Christmas tree in our dining room. We have a huge Douglas fir tree this year, 8 feet tall. It came down on a truck from the forests in Oregon.

It is of course, now dead, but still green and perfumes our whole house. We have covered it with decorations. From the hand-sewn hearts I made when I was a penniless young bride, to the porcelain angels my mother gave me in the 1960’s and the glass ornaments hand blown by your Aunt Ela, each elf, bird, feather and paper Santa Claus has a story. I hope you know all the stories and treasure them as I do, and once a year, pull them out and decorate something, even if it is not a Christmas tree.

Are there still Christmas trees? Is Christmas even celebrated? The religious wars simmering between Christian, Muslim and Jew and the great mass of “secular thinkers” are bitter in my time but may have escalated in yours to something darker and more dire. Something that would keep you from knowing star gazer lilies and mesquite honey and crisp sweet Fuji apples. I hope these tastes and smells are so common to you that you are wondering why I write about them in such loving detail. I hope the peace and plenty evidenced by my over laden table is not only your birthright, but your reality.

Maybe it would be more sensible if future generations did not have Christmas trees. I must admit to warring with my conscience this year, even though we will use the tree later for firewood and garden mulch. But the long Western droughts have killed many forests who hadn’t already succumbed to fire. Our precious forests, like our precious children, our precious water, animals, birds, have been squandered to make large new houses and impossibly grand cities and cars and to clear the way for cheap hamburgers for the masses and great fortunes for a few people made on the laboring backs of many. We are all in some ways complicit and I am trying to undo the knot of my own guilt by reducing my use of plastic, water, oil, electricity, by kindness to animals and people, and by my art—writing, performing and lobbying for peace and on behalf of the natural world.

In the mornings, I make prayers with seeds and cornmeal, with water and laughter. I dance barefoot on the earth and shed tears which I offer. I taught your grandmother and mother how to do these dances. I hope you do them too.

If the Earth has made it through her Great Global Warming transition and you are well, happy, showering every day, and singing in that shower, I am very happy.

If you and yours do not know want, poverty, or scarcity, I am relieved. If the light is still kindly, caressing, illuminating but not wounding, I rejoice. If you as a woman are free to speak, think, dress and do as you in your good sense and good heart see fit, I am content.

I will finish by saying that I have just eaten a blackberry. A blackberry is an elongated globe made of tinier roundish globes, plump and dark black purple. Some of the globes are more red and some almost blue black. There is a fleshy center core and each tiny globe has a seed stuck into it. I don’t mind the seeds. The taste is cool, blue-bitter as well as sweet, very juicy and delicious. I hope you have many blackberries to taste in your life, some grown on your own bushes.

We all know some huge change is coming. We are trying to make the Great Turn back into harmony with each other and with the earth. I wish we were doing more, faster, better. But just in case it wasn’t enough or wasn’t in time, you have my sincerest and deepest apologies.

I love you, my darling. If you are reading this, you have survived, and for that I am grateful. Wherever I am, I am on your side and on the side of all good hearted beings.

Forever and always,

Your very own Great Grandmother,

jill

This week I lost my diamond in the washing machine. I was tugging on some wet towels that were stuck in the cycle, and the diamond just popped out of my ring. The ring stayed stubbornly on my finger, empty, with its "solitaire" claws bent up to my face. This 1.5 carat diamond was a gift to my mother from my father on their twenty-fifth anniversary, and a gift from my mother to me just before my fifteenth.

I had been thinking, earlier in the day, that I was repeating my mother's life. I had a child at a too-young age, made a marriage to a sweet, spiritually-aware man who had recently fallen in love with another woman, and made a determined midlife decision to make my life what it needed to be.

I stood staring at my empty ring in a panic. Was losing my mother's diamond a message from her? She was fully capable of such statements. Several months after she died in 2003, I was shelving some of her rare books collection, and a book fell on my head and opened to the words she had scrawled in the back: "I love you and I need to say good-bye."

Just to be sure I wasn't fictionalizing this event, I reshelved the book and another fell on my head. It was a diary that she had kept on her trip to Thailand in the 70s. I opened to the passage that read "Buddhism is a religion of love." Ah, so you accept my Buddhist practice now, Mama?

My mother was not subtle. The words "brutally honest" were invented for her, personally. It would be like her to speak her mind in plain English, even from the grave.

I continued dusting and shelving. I managed to dodge the full force of the third book to come down on my head, How to Win Friends and Influence People, but as it hit the floor, a piece of paper tumbled out with my brother's phone number scrawled on it. Okay, Mama, I get it, you want me to call and tell him about the books falling on my head and that I love him. Stop throwing books at me, it hurts.

As my son and I wrung and uncurled wet towels from the washing machine, looking for my diamond, I sobbed. My mother had high expectations for me, which included riches, fame, glory. Her diamond was supposed to be the first of many that I would win with my work. I had proved unworthy of her legacy. Once again.

In a hopeless effort to recover what I knew was lost, I called Sears. The girl on the other end of the line was sympathetic, but didn't hold out much hope. She promised to send a repairman in a few days.

I went back to watching CNN and sat mesmerized by the coverage of New Orleans, the lost children, the weeping journalists who could touch and smell what we could not touch and smell no matter how many live feeds were rolled before our eyes. The Stench of Death and Rotting Hope in the Jewel of the Delta. I felt selfish. I had clean clothes, food in the fridge, money in the bank, what the hell did I have to cry about?

I have been to New Orleans only once. At 21, my life was a royal, bicontinental mess. I had a small child, her father in Oklahoma whom I was supposed to marry, my true love in Scotland whom I would eventually marry, two passports, two houses, two sets of friends, two lives, one on either side of the Atlantic. My mother said, "Honey, your father wants to see the King Tut Exhibit in New Orleans, why don't you come along? If nothing else, you'll have to stop crying long enough to eat some Shrimp Remoulade."

October 1975, New Orleans. The heat had just backed up and everybody was on the streets having a party. I met a German guy my own age who flew gliders and had ridden a high wind into East Germany where he'd been in jail for the last few months. "In East Berlin," he said, "everybody eats sugar all the time. Now, that's all I want. There's a place down on Canal Street that makes fresh beignets at three in the morning. Want to come?" Oh yeah.

After a night of sugar, I wandered around and tap danced with some eight-year-old black kids on Bourbon Street and learned the name of the drugstore where the most beautiful hooker I'd ever seen—Sweet Lorraine—tall and golden-skinned and hair down to her behind—got her iridescent gold and green eye shadow so I could get some too.

New Orleans had its own bright-colored shadows. Its own rhythm. The moist vibrant air was warm at midnight, but the leaves on the trees had turned gold. And the music was already golden.

The sidewalk and the wide stone stairs leading up to the New Orleans Museum of Art were painted a deep Nile blue. The blue of lapis lazuli. As I walked toward the entrance, the air rippled with this color. I felt like Cleopatra, Nefertiti—hell—I just felt like the young jiggly girl that I was, for the first time in months. A young black man lounged on the blue-green steps playing the sax. He was ragged and poor with a big Afro and looked no more than 16. Damn, I thought, I'm walking up the Nile, dancing up the Nile, and I began rocking and swaying my hips in time to his jazzy beat.

I saw King Tut as an ancient Kennedy—his dynasty covering thousands of years of the human imagination, instead of a brief few. His exhibit was so splendid, I lost track of my small life, of standing in myself, protecting myself, and everything in my purse got shoplifted. But even after I went to the ladies' room and found that my handmade woven purse from Guatemala was completely empty, I really didn't give a damn.

I had a timeless moment standing in front of a glass case with iridescent blue perfume bottles and jewelry. "One of these bottles had perfume with poison in it, that's how they killed him." I blurted out to the person standing next to me, a short, round woman with big square glasses who looked at me as if I might belong in the display case myself. I don't know why I thought this about the tiny perfume bottle—or "knew this," but I stood staring for such a long time that I lost my parents and got drifted along with the crowd. By the time I staggered outside, they'd taken a taxi back to the hotel and the boy with the sax had gone, leaving a fluttering of ragged trash paper around the blue-green stairs where he had stood.

That night, I had dinner with my parents—the promised Shrimp Remoulade—and a lecture from my mother on how I should become an attorney or a Supreme Court Justice if I had decided not to be a movie star—and, by the way, I should not marry that "boy in England" who would just break my heart.

I hate it when she's right, especially so many years after the fact.

I listened dutifully to my mother, said I had a headache, and left to have an early night. But I was too restless to sleep. I slipped out and drifted around on the streets.

I couldn't get that ragged young sax player off my mind. I sat down in the back of a dim little jazz club at 3 a.m. and wrote a poem about him. I imagined that he'd had a hard life. That he lived with his Grandmama, had got into trouble with the racist New Orleans police, and just been released from a juvenile detention cage. He had no job and lived on the handouts from tourists like me. In the poem, he slipped into the museum around midnight, cut tiny pieces of lapis lazuli off the Boy King's crown, and swallowed it. The lapis was magical—it gave him the power to fly—and he went back outside, opened up his arms, and rose into the air. As he flew up through the earth's atmosphere, his young body froze—solid and lifeless as a mummy—and he passed into the earth's orbit, becoming a human satellite, floating like an angel, over the Delta, every 24 hours. I called the poem Lapis Lazuli.

The musicians in the tiny club teased me about hunching over my journal, scribbling, in the middle of the night. "What's a fine woman like you doing alone in 'Nawleens' at 5 a.m.? You writin' some kinda testimony?" I laughed, declined their offer for breakfast, and walked back to my posh hotel—my heart light with the flight of the young musician.

Two nights ago, I had a dream. I dreamed that I found a fish who said she was very old, an ancient Egyptian. At first I had thought the fish was dead, but she opened her eye and looked up at me, spoke and wiggled her mermaid tail and her two long antennae, like goldfish whiskers.

I realized that her iridescent scales were jewels—jewel—that she was my mother's diamond, trapped in a watery grave at the bottom of my washing machine, and that she wanted to be rescued and tell me about her long journey.

I had never considered that the diamond's life began long before my father gave my mother this ring. Or that the diamond had been more than a silent witness to the crises in my own marriage. But there she was—one-eyed, shimmering, wise Egyptian Queen of Fish—deep, black, very ancient, and dying.

In the morning, the Sears man came. My daughter had started a load of clothes on Friday and the murky water was standing where we'd left it when I yelled at her to turn the machine off.

Johnnie, the Sears repairman, was an LA Mexican homeboy, raised in Boyle Heights. He said he understood about sentimental value. He'd lost his dad when he was eight, and all he had was this Little League bat his dad had bought him at Big Five.

"I wouldn't take nothin' for that bat," he said. "I wouldn't take no Porsche or Humvee or big house. I'd kill for that bat. And my mom, if something happened to my mom, I'd just freak. She got her own life now. I understand that. I don't live with her no more, but she is big to me, you know, not fat, but she big. Me and my brothers, that's all we got, each other and our mom."

It was ingenious the way my Kenmore 70 Series Sears Deluxe Heavy Duty washing machine was put together. Like Legos. Johnnie took the top off of the machine, which had been held on with little plastic rubber bands.

"You stone gone down the drain," he said. "Even if you daughter just got half through the cycle, it's gone, these machines, man, they don't waste nothin'."

I didn't cry, but he knew I didn't care if it was a lost cause. He knelt down and took off the front panel and then just lifted the washing tub out.

"I had a dream," I said, "I dreamed the diamond was in there, under the water, in the dark."

He looked up at me. "You got lots of people under water now," he said, and left it at that. And of course, he was right.

I have TiVo, so I can fast forward through the really bad parts of the CNN live New Orleans coverage. The parts where the bodies float by the boats and the reporters just stand and stare. The parts where the desperate black people stand in front of the Convention Center and cry for help. The parts where the old black people, so old they can hardly walk, are dragging themselves through waist-high water toward boats that hold reporters who are not going to pick them up. I fast forward and then I go back. I pick them up in my mind and hold them in my own little boat and pray, "Oh God, please help them," and know that I am high and dry and just looking at their eyes in such suffering makes me responsible.

Beneath the metal cage of the washing machine that holds your actual clothes—is a big round cylinder made of third-world plastic—thin and brittle and milky white. We began emptying the water out of the plastic tub with a measuring cup and pouring it into a blue scrub bucket. When it was full, I carried the bucket to the garden and poured slowly, filtering the water through my fingers and watching on the ground for anything that caught the glint of the sun. There was nothing but hair and grease and that scum that builds up from hard city water.

Once the plastic tub was empty, Johnnie unscrewed it, and we were down to the guts of the machine, the last filter and the pump.

"You got nothin' in there," he said. "But give me that bucket again. Them two hoses got water in 'em." And he gently ran his fingers around the springy rubber hoses, and water splashed onto the floor in uneven splooshes, like water coming out of the mother just before the baby is born. He filled the bucket and handed it to me.

I sloshed the dark soapy water around before I poured it out.

Nothing.

"It just a ring," he said. "You got other things from her, right?"

"Yeah, I have her hips, actually. And her flat feet and her fast mouth."

But he wasn't laughing. He was removing the pump. A little plastic box with cylindrical horns either side where the hoses attach. He was shaking it gently, and turning it round and round. There was nothing rattling in there.

He handed it to me. I shook, probed, and searched. It was empty.

"I'm sorry," he said. "You didn't have no chance."

I thought of the long roads people were taking to find food, shelter, gasoline. To find their families, their children, their husbands, their mothers.

"Doesn't matter." I said. But since I was weeping, he knew I didn't mean it.

I am like my mother. I don't think I'm repeating your life, Mama. I think I've added a factor of ten. First of all, I'm ten pounds lighter. Second, I've got ten thousand choices that you didn't have, and third, I'm ten times more stubborn. Just to prove this third point, I took Johnnie's flashlight and began shining it into the little pump.

Johnnie was packing up his equipment. He looked up at me. It was a look that means: "In five minutes I be out of here and you husband or you family or whoever is that deals with you will explain that you diamond is gone and you got to let it go."

"I can't believe we didn't find it," I said. "I had a dream."

"So did M. L. King, homegirl. Didn't do him no good."

I laughed. But I took the flashlight and shined it all over him and all over me and all over the floor. And it was there—a little white glob in the puddle by his left boot. It didn't shine. It was upside down and covered with scum. He picked it up.

"Oh my God," he said. "Oh Jesus! Holy Mary Mother of sh..!"

And I said, "I have a really stubborn mom."

There wasn't much space to dance around between the guts of the washing machine and the walls of my little laundry room, but somehow we did it.

I made sure I knew how to spell his name right so I could write a big letter to Sears about what a hero he was. After he left, I washed off the diamond and put it in a little case I've got.

I stood up at the window of my bedroom watching the stars rise over the hills. How many beautiful dark-eyed souls are in the sky tonight, flapping their lapis blue wings, a new flock of turquoise blue stars, frozen in flight, smiling down on the Delta.
Cue the blues music…

With this piece RealTALK inaugurates a dedicated space for LA writers who tell good stories. First up is part one of a short series from jill Wright, a widely published poet and writer. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize. She lives in the Hollywood Hills.

Albuquerque, New Mexico is the Chili Capital of the world. In the hospital coffee shop, the waitress took one look at me and said, "Honey, you look like you could use some coffee with a shot of chili in it."

I laughed. "I am dreading going upstairs to see my mother," I said, "but I think I'll fortify myself with straight black English tea."

My mother has always had some strange identity confusion with me. I am her only daughter and she so wanted me to live the life she didn't have. She was beautiful, intense, and alcoholic and she often crossed the line with me. Or didn't realize there was a line. In my 20s, she and I wrote a book together and she took my name off of it and shopped it in New York. A few years later, I wrote new lyrics to a song she had penned in the 1940s. My nephew wrote new music, and she liked it so much, she removed our names, re-filed the copyright with her as sole writer, and sold it to a County Western label.

The last ten years of her life, my brother Jackson lived with her. I am named Jill and so we are Jack and Jill. When he was in college, he changed his name to "Jackson" because he was sick of not knowing where he ended and my mother and I began.

I didn't change my name. I moved to Europe. And then later, to California. Jackson, one of the most brilliant people I've ever known, earned three law degrees, including one in England, then moved back in with my mom, helped with her care, and began lawsuits against our other two brothers, a neighbor, my father's former business partner, and everybody else who was on my mother's Enemies List.

For purposes of this narrative I will henceforward refer to Jackson as "JB" so I don't get myself sued out of existence.

Her degenerating mind was progressive. When she first became ill, and I visited my childhood home, she would walk me around the house, point to a photo of my high school graduation, a painting of me as a teenage dancer, and an even younger photo of me tap dancing in a red sequined costume, and explain that these were pictures of her "niece." Six months later, these same portraits were pictures of her "sister." After a couple of years, she told me that the pictures of me were pictures of her in her younger days.

"Don't you have a daughter?" I asked.

"No. Those are pictures of me. I was high school Valedictorian and I was a beauty queen and when I was little, I tap danced."

The next year, when she and Jackson moved to Albuquerque and she was officially diagnosed with Alzheimer's, her dementia deepened. Talking with her on the phone became incredibly difficult. Which one of us was 80 years old and disoriented and which was a young mother living in LA writing children's books? She was the young one, she was sure of that. And I was some crazy old interloper.

When I went to New Mexico to visit, she not only didn't recognize me but she firmly denied my existence. She maintained that she and her "husband," JB, had only one child—a son who had died. When my mother looked me in the eyes and erased my existence, I lost my appetite. After a few days, I got anxiety attacks, and then began to pee a lot.

I resigned myself to being the person who sent the checks for her care, not the person who was welcome to come and see her.

But after a lapse of nearly two years, I had a vivid dream about my sweet dead father. He told me that my mother was in the hospital and needed me. "Daddy," I said, "I've been officially erased. She doesn't even know me."

His smile was as sweet as the homemade ice cream he used to eat with a fork. "Her soul knows you, Jilly," he said. "It's only her mind that's confused."

So, after two cups of strong black tea, I gave in and asked the red-headed waitress for the chili coffee. It was disgusting, but with enough sugar, I was able to focus on my burning tongue and my gagging reflex at the same time, which took my mind off my mother.

I had been told that mama was "lingering" and near death, yet she persistently lived. Pondering this as I rolled my burning tongue around in my mouth, I decided that my mother had pissed off the Angel of Death. It's more than likely that she has put him on her Enemies List. Probably she and JB are suing him.

When I get upstairs, my mother is restless in her starchy hospital bed. Her false teeth are gone, only her bottom front teeth remain. Dried spittle and medicine crust the corners of her drawn-down mouth. She has a diaper, a catheter, a tube in her nose for oxygen, a tube in her arm for medicine. Her thinning, but still dark hair is plastered to her head, and inexplicably, neatly parted on the right. The doctor I spoke to on the phone was right, I think. She is dying. If it was up to me, I would encourage her to let go.

But it's not up to me. Her chosen protector is my brother who is every inch the fighter that she is. This is her journey to do as she wishes. And with that one thought, I untie the knot of our tangled identity.

As if she has heard my thoughts, she opens her eyes, grabs my hand, holds onto me and says, "Jill, you're beautiful. You're the prettiest girl I ever saw."

I blink back tears. This is a minor miracle! She has given me her standard greeting familiar since the age of five or so. She is once again in the flow of time. Perhaps she is saying good-bye? Or hello? But there is no question about the contact. It is deep and strong. I hold her hands, soothe her forehead, she uncurls her legs and goes to sleep. A real deep, peaceful sleep.

I pray. I stare at the patterned blue wallpaper and wrap myself in my white shawl. I am Love. God is Love. She is Love. She sleeps. Wakes. Looks for my hand. Sleeps.

As the morning progresses, I try to find her nurse, her doctor, someone I can talk to. It is the weekend. All the shifts are temporary. All the people temporary. Her regular nurse appears briefly and tells me that the doctor has told the staff to withhold food and water. That my mother has failed her swallowing test. That hospice is involved. I ask again to see a doctor, a chart. I am told, at last, after four or five hours, that the substitute for the substitute for her real doctor will be in the ward around 3 p.m. Maybe later.

When this small, graying man finally arrives, he is aggressive, hostile. He takes me for a stroll around the octagon of the corridors. He repeats that there is an order for no food or water.

"Not even in a tube?" I ask. He shakes his head, exasperated, as if I have just suggested we ice skate in the hall.

"But she knows me," I insist. "She asked for water. She's thirsty."

He grows increasingly agitated. "Your mother is dying!" he says for the fifth time as if I am a slow-witted child.

"But what is she dying of? Is she dying of cancer? Pneumonia? Flu?"

"She's dying because she's ninety-one!" He shouts at me.

"Trust me, that's not enough to kill her."

He doesn't laugh. He doesn't know my mother, hasn't examined her. Hasn't read her chart. He then stops in mid-stride to tell me that he knows how I feel, he went through something similar with his father—had to withhold food, water, medicine.

"What was he dying of?'

"Cancer. And pneumonia. And finally, kidney failure." I nod. I am truly sorry and say so. But I counter that my mother at the moment doesn't have any of those things.

"But your mother can't swallow! She failed her swallowing test!"

I think briefly that, once upon a time, the President's mistress did too, but hold my tongue.

"What did you give her?"

"I don't know—peas? "

"I'd fail my swallowing test too," I said. "She hates peas. She hates everything but cookies and ice cream. And sometimes fried chicken livers. Anyway she can talk. She's asking for water."

He begins pounding on the door of an empty room. "Here are your choices!" he shouts, and writes an invisible number with his finger on the door as if we are facing a blackboard. "One. You can force feed her—she will aspirate and die. Her lungs will fill up."

He looks back at me as if I can see what he has written. "Three. She will be fed by IV and get well enough to ask for food. She will aspirate on the food and die!"

He jabs a dot at the end of one of his invisible sentences on the blank wooden surface.

He is really worked up.

"What about two?" I ask.

He shouts, "You're not being logical! There is no two!" He jabs his finger against the door for emphasis. I'm convinced he can actually see what he's written there.

"I think two is food and water in a tube."

"Then she'll get strong enough to ask for food and water and she'll aspirate and die!"

"But she's asking for water now."

"We don't want to do aggressive intervention."

"I think not giving water to someone who's asking for it is aggressive non-intervention."

"She has no quality of life!"

"And...she's thirsty."

He doesn't laugh. And he doesn't understand. Her struggle with the Enemy goes on and there's nothing my mother likes better than a good hard fight.

I return to her room. She asks for ice cream. I try to tell her why she can't have any.

"But I'm not fat," she says.

JB arrives. The mad doctor takes us into an empty room and begins his diatribe. JB stops the doctor's spiel, tells him to give our mother food and water in a tube— "Help her sit up as my sister has requested, try not to get yourself and your hospital sued out of existence!"

The doctor looks offended. "You don't need to shout," he says prissily as if he and I have been waltzing up and down the halls for the last two hours. Before he can start finger writing on doors again, I leave.

A few hours later, the doctor stops by. My mother is sitting up with her teeth in, eating vanilla ice cream. He asks her how she's doing. She ignores him, turns to me. "Can you drive, jill?"

"Of course. Can you swallow?'

"Yes. Do you have a car?"

I nod.

"Lets get the hell out of here. I hate these people."

But a few minutes later, she drifts away from me again.

So what is hidden? What is despised, put aside?

The sexuality of the old.

Seeing a smooth young body rippling with the current of love is easy to look at. We feel aroused, tender, sweet.

But seeing the same current flow through a body shriveled and loose, bald, toothless, disabled, or blanked is not easy to look at, not tender or sweet.

Shocking, embarrassing, shameful, strange, macabre…creepy…

But it wasn't. As I sat at my mother's bedside on my last night in Albuquerque, I realized she was playing with herself. Ninety-one years old, she is "failing her swallowing test," but she is pleasuring herself! The catheter that the doctors have insisted on for weeks has found her small rosebud, the current of life still flows strong in her hips. She rocks back and forth, her mouth open, her pelvis gyrating.

She will not let me touch her, though a moment before she started this, she had a tight hold on my hand. I see her face, so old and sunken, it is like a monkey's face, toothless now that they will not put in her plate, but her body's rhythm is steady like the farm girl she once was. Like the animals she tended. She is pleasing herself now. This is why they want to kill her. This is it.

And this is why I know she is not dying.

My Grandmother once told me that our souls are fastened to our bodies at three places: the soles of the feet, the breast-bone, and the hips. By far the strongest tie is to the hips.

This does seem to be true. An old woman breaks her hip and she is gone. Fewer than two winters later, her soul has come untied and flies free.

An old woman gyrates her hips, and she wiggles back into her body, nestles there, ties the knot tight. Refuses to leave.

My mother seems aware of me only as she finishes.

And then she sleeps.

I think it is difficult to be supple in one's mind and expectations.

To be with what is and not be disappointed, bitter, brittle, or afraid. Death teaches us this. My mother's death in particular—it's not a clean crossing, made in a moment's release, or a fast hard ride with an inevitable ending. Her death is a walk from stone to stone across a broad river, stopping at pebbles, stopping to bathe, falling, shivering, gasping for air, floating, finding her feet again.

When she finally reaches her destination, it will be an accomplishment, a triumph, and she will have taken every step of her dance.

I think of the irate Doctor and his need to tidy up his ward by killing my mother. I understand that he needs the bed. But we're dealing with one of the great dances of the Universe here—Death. Mother Death. How about we show a little respect.