My mother arrived at the care center wearing a paper-thin hospital gown under the heap of warming blankets that had been tucked around her. She also had her oxygen tanks, a chapstick, and a bottle of lotion. She came with nothing at all of the life she had lived save for me, the black-parka-ed daughter leaping out of a car to meet her wheelchair, and A., my partner of two decades, parking the car. There was, for the record, also her husband–yes, there he was, my benighted father, standing in the entryway; somehow his failing mind had grabbed hold of the details of her coming here; somehow his erratic and increasingly alarming command of a car had brought him here. And here he was, a deceptively lean octogenarian moving stiffly to open the door; something grudging in his posture, the usual dark clouds on his brow and blankness in his eyes.

Wheeled from the van by Eve the paramedic, the bent-twig-in-a-blanket that was my mother was again surprisingly alert. I think she must have been frightened, although I could see little as I loped toward her except the too-big oxygen mask. From yards away, it looked as though a small plastic deli container had been plopped over her face. But by the time she spotted me, I could make out relief and gladness; she turned her head toward my voice and even before I reached her side I could see the weak smile. She had absolutely no idea where she was, or why, but–and here again the remarkable essence of her, her way of always turning toward the light–sick as she was, completely at sea after her medi-van ride, there was curiosity sparking in her, and a trustingness, and something of a feeble hopefulness.

With her mind no longer firing on all cylinders, though, the doctors had spared her the details. They’d only be a muddle for her, and give rise to anxiety–and then go right out of her head. The same, of course, was true of my father, although his muddle was also angry, landmines everywhere. The burden of the facts, of the hard truth of things, had thus fallen to me. My mother, the doctors had made clear, was in rough shape after her week’s hospital stay. The ruination of her lungs was nearly complete; now her wasted body was also under siege by a violent surging in her bloodstream.

A gaggle of doctors and social workers had kindly but clearly filled out the picture. With her COPD and now a rogue bleeding disorder, her weight 78 pounds and dropping, her appetite gone, her spirit weak, my mother was hanging on by half a thread. The scantest effort–I could see it for myself as she labored to lift a fork–left her gasping; her discomfort and distress was so awful when she shifted her weight for a sponge bath that she cried out. Her lungs were clearly failing. Now with the new bleeding problem she was also at dangerously high risk of clots and strokes. Her hemorrahging nostrils packed with gauze, a breathing mask now required over her mouth, she had lain with her eyes closed for much of her week in the hospital, all of her steadfast cheerfulness gone.

I had never seen her with her spirit so drained, her candles all but out; the grimness of her was unprecedented and shocking. In the hallway outside my mother’s room, tears poured out of me as I met with the hospital social worker. “She can’t live like this,” I choked out. “If ever anyone needed and deserved an angel of mercy to land on her shoulder, it’s this woman.” Angel. Mercy. Words not exactly right; words strange to my everyday lexicon, so often the stuff of Hallmark cards and churchyness and rainbow and unicorn art; but no other words swam into mind as I formed my fierce lamentations.

Mercy, I’d pleaded. How is it, then, that I was so unprepared for the stark prognosis. The leaden thud in my gut, the lurch of my heartbeat. “We’re there,” said the internist and the hematologist and the pulmonologist. It was time, they said, for my sister and me to think about hospice care. What we were looking at, they clarified carefully, when I asked, was no more than 9 to 12 months.

She lasted, as it happened, less than 30 days after leaving the hospital. Her medi-van deposited her at the care center on New Year’s Eve. By the end of January, she was gone.