Sunday

   I'm sitting beside Mom in her room in the nursing home, and she is sitting up asleep in her big reclining chair. Her right hand is tucked against her face, the heel of her hand below her chin as though propping up her head, the palm and fingers on her cheek. It's a gesture I remember seeing countless times throughout our lives together.
   Down the hall, someone has finally turned off a mechanical tone that sounded for all the world like "flat-lining" on a heart monitor. But I know it wasn't. This is a place of medical or random noises that sound dire when they aren't. It's just the building clearing its throat.
   She stirs now and then, sometimes arching her back as though uncomfortable. How could she possibly be comfortable? She stopped moving with purpose or even fidgeting three years ago, so I'm sure she has chronic aches from immobility.

   When I walked in with this week's flower arrangement and saw her mouth gaping, I was glad. I was ashamed to be glad, but I was glad. If I want to, I get to leave at any time. Set down the flowers, turn around and leave. Not sit for an hour holding my laptop in the air in front of her face, twisting my torso awkwardly to show her the latest or the oldest — any — photos of the happy scenes from what I guess is my life elsewhere, the grandbabies, the kittens. It feels nothing like my life when I am sitting here.
   But this has been one of those weeks when my outside of this place life was difficult, upsetting, and I feel sorry for myself. I have seen myself making a mediocre job of lots of things  even while stressing out trying to do them well. 
   Typos, fleas, small acts of poor judgment. Typos are like fleas are like my poor ideas, and it all makes my left eyelid twitch. 

   "Oh God, There's no way," she said, just now. Quietly, maybe in her sleep.  
   But maybe not, and so I lean over to give her a kiss, and my nose bumps into her forehead. 
   "You knocked me out," she says.
   I apologize. I offer her some water, a little sip of water from her tan jug with its easy to clean, sometimes hard to pull from giant straw. Today she has no trouble with the straw. 
   "That's good," she says, nodding. 
   She closes her eyes again. After a while she starts to snore. And here we sit.