Mom walked on from this life to yonder on Tuesday, May 5, 2020, just three months before her 89th birthday– which is today, Wednesday, August 5. Eighty-nine years ago, she was born in the Walnut homeplace on the 5th of August in 1931, also a Wednesday.

At some point in the study I do to teach Native American literature the best I can, I ran across the notion of “walking on” as a euphemism for death. I liked the sound of that–“walking on”–better than our culture’s more widely used variations of “passing away” (as gently poetic as that may sound), and so I think about the dead as walking on and use the phrase whenever I can. I like to think of my mom as having walked on, because it’s a particularly comforting image for a woman who was bedridden and unable to walk in the final years of her life.

I’ve thought a lot about her over the past three months, but I haven’t had the heart or the mind to write about the loss of her, other than the obituary that my brother Jerry and I wrote. (Read it here.) I don’t know that I have a whole lot of heart and mind to write about her now, but I wanted to capture something of our last few hours with her. I’m approaching my 62nd birthday, so I need to write it before I lose it in my own aging.

The last time I saw Mom when she knew me and something of what was going on around her was on Monday, March 9, just before all the nursing facilities shut down. And the last time I talked to her was, I think, sometime in the last few days of March or the first few of April, when she was able to get one of the CNAs at the Brian Center to dial Leesa’s telephone. She sounded good and in good spirits, but while Leesa made other attempts through April to have a CNA help with the telephone, we weren’t able to talk with her again.

During the evening of Saturday, May 2, Leesa and I hung out with Sam and Sharon Barnett, the only friends we’d regularly been seeing since March. We’d just returned home later that night when Jerry called–around 10:30, I think. The Brian Center had reached out to him to say that Mom wasn’t going to last much longer. Jerry was on his way there, and I hit the road as well.

I’ve never been in the presence of somebody whose death is expected any moment, but that’s where I found myself late in the night on May 2nd and into the wee hours of May 3rd. Mom’s eyes were open but unseeing, as far as I could tell. She had an oxygen tube in her nose, which was easing her breathing but not breathing for her. She might have made some semiconscious responses to our voices or our touches, but it’s hard to say.

I stayed until 3:30 AM on Sunday the 3rd and then returned home to Tennessee. Leesa and I went back later and stayed much of Sunday. Jerry and Cathy were there Sunday evening, and Jerry slept there overnight. I returned on Monday–so that Jerry could go home and rest–and spent most of the day. That evening Jerry came back and again spent the night.

Mom’s doctor told Leesa and me on Sunday that the loneliness of the quarantine had, she believe, hastened a few deaths, and she implied that this could be part of Mom’s condition. Then on Monday, the doctor had a story for Jerry and me about an experience from early in her career. A mix-up occurred with a dying woman’s last wishes, and she had been resuscitated when she and her family didn’t want her to be. As a result, she lingered in a senseless state for two weeks, until, eventually, one of the family members asked if the oxygen tube was keeping her alive. The doctors didn’t think so, but the family asked that it be removed anyway. The woman passed within five minutes after the tube’s removal.

Of course, a question hung in the air of Mom’s room, but then Jerry said he wasn’t quite ready to take such a step.

This whole time, from Saturday night into Monday evening, I tried to work. We were coming into final exam week at ETSU, but that didn’t make much of an impression me in the moment. I didn’t get much accomplished. But I thought about some of the tremendous reading experiences I’ve had that assured me we weren’t alone in what we were going through and helped me understand that the complexities of such a moment are common to our humanity. I thought a lot, for example, about this poem from Emily Dickinson.

We living have our expectations about the moment of death–that the veil between this world and the next will briefly part, that our loved one will be transfigured into something glorious and be able somehow to transmit that glory to us before departing, that in the transmission those of us left behind will share in that transfiguration. This is not to say that these things don’t happen. This is to say only that despite our expectations the moment passes–for most of us–in mystery, and we’re left, again, to rely our faith.

I’m sure many deaths are more difficult to watch than Mom’s, but I wouldn’t want to witness worse. (A friend of mine might be going through a worse death even as I write this.) When I returned to the Brian Center on Tuesday morning, the 5th, Jerry didn’t go home as he’d done on Sunday and Monday, having gotten, he said, better sleep through the wee hours of Tuesday morning than he’d had on previous nights. So, the both of us stayed there with Mom.

I hadn’t been there long when Jerry asked what I thought about turning off the oxygen. I said I was okay with it. Rather than wait for the doctor or call for a CNA, Jerry got up, walked to the machine, and turned it off. I thought I noticed some slight physical reaction from Mom, but nothing really changed. Her breathing was just as labored–against the proverbial death rattle–but just as steady as before.

I was thinking, This hanging on is mostly the work of biology, the body struggling to live as it is created to do. Although the medical personnel had been draining fluid out of her airways every few hours since Saturday, they’d stopped doing so during the previous night. Mom’s eyes were open but showing only whites. A gray-yellow mucus periodically pooled in her bottom lip, and Jerry and I took turns wiping it away. Jerry had a last box of tissues, and I had a series of washcloths that I was rinsing out to do this work. (I’m sorry to describe these moments, but I think it’s important to the meaning of what was coming.)

Nothing seemed to be changing in Mom’s condition, but Jerry was running out of tissues. Along about 1:00 in the afternoon, I rinsed out a washcloth and took my place on Mom’s right, and Jerry stood on her left with the last tissues. We took turns leaning in and gently wiping her mouth.

When we each stood with a hand on her shoulder, ministering to her together, the moment came. Mom’s breathing eased. Slowed. Stopped. Although I’d thought her being alive was merely the body fighting to survive, that moment transcended biology when the three of us were together. Maybe that veil parted so that others were present. Dad. Papa and Mama Reeves. I like to think so. But in that moment, really, the three of us were enough.

And then we were only two, as Mom walked on beyond the walls of the Brian Center, beyond our beloved mountains, beyond the moon.

Mom walked on . . . beyond.