The old woman is circling around the flame like a demented moth.

What drives her now? Is it Death? No matter what we call it, there’s nothing I can do about it. Her lungs are a pneumonia-ridden mess. She’s probably had it for a long time, low-grade, and now her chest is filled with secondary crud and blockages they can’t get to without opening her up. She’s almost 87 and doesn’t want the pulmonary surgery. Maybe she’s not so crazy, after all. Except that she is, of course. Word is she can focus on some things and seems to understand, but then forgets, and now she’s paranoid. Hears mocking, threatening voices.

The hospital is actually discharging her tomorrow, too, surprising all of us, even my 50-year-old baby sister (the nurse!), who’s come out from Los Angeles. My mother has to have some sort of IV in her arm at home, antibiotics for the pneumonia, and someone’s going to come by every day to check on that. My sister will stay there with her for most of the day and see how it goes. It’s come to this, then, helping with meals, getting the old lady to the shower — if she’ll cooperate — and keeping the IV going when she tries to pull it out. I can’t see this working out. It sounds more like a play instead of real life.

I was going to rent a car and shoot down to Tucson tomorrow to help my sister line up a nursing home, but that isn’t happening, not yet. The old woman would surely put up a fight, and who would take her in such condition anyway? I think the hospital is sending her home to die. I just wish someone would tell us straight, “a week or two, she’s going…” But they hardly ever do. And when it does happen, they’re usually wrong! When my mother-in-law was in bad shape, the doctors told my wife her mother had a week to live, at most. She’d stopped eating and drinking, and that was that. Then something happened and she ate a little bit. Suddenly she “got better” and lived another year — with raging dementia that stripped her of her dignity, but she lived a while. So there’s just no way to know.

Home care won’t work for Helen very long. She’d get abusive or inconsolable. No one could stand it, not even my sister, the brilliant registered nurse. If a nursing home is out, and she’s impossible to care for, something else is going on. Circling around the flame, all right. I’m beginning to realize that that’s the Plan, that nothing else is going to work.

She’s going to make me come see her, I know it. (This is even bracketing my birthday, right?) She’s going to hang on until I drive down there to hold her hand and watch her die, just like I had to do with Dad. I’ll walk in the door, and 10 minutes later she’ll be gone. You could take that to the bank, except we never know. Not really. But that would be just like her… She even has a fucking discount coupon for cremation! “Burn one, get one free,” or something like that. Probably picked it up when Dad died.

(Tighter circles now, wing scales popping on the pass…)