On New Year’s Eve, my mother took her last trip, bumping along a suburban freeway in a medi-van to a care center perched over snow-covered wetlands–the place she would, as it happened, spend the rest of her life. Descending on the van’s wheelchair lift at the center’s doorway, the scrawny white-haired thing swaddled in heated blankets–my mother–looked like nothing so much as a rescued wren. She looked disoriented, but also alert. Her face lit up when I bounded into view with my vase of wilting daisies.

She’d been released from hospital to care center after a rocky week. She’d seemed at death’s door–in truth, the crumbled wisp of her would fit in death’s mail slot. But then she had begun opening her eyes for longer stretches, had managed a few frail tendrils of conversation, had nibbled at a yam and taken a bite of tuna on toast; this was apparently enough to get her discharged. Her feebleness was alarming, but the suits at Medicare, her doctors had explained–not without sympathy–had their rules. I’d hovered over my mother as her shriveled body was lifted off the hospital bed and packed into a wheelchair for transport by a capable paramedic named Eve; I’d trod alongside, with welling eyes and a vase of wilting daisies, as she was propelled slowly down hallways, onto an elevator, into the frigid winter sun of the hospital driveway.

Steam rose above her heated blankets as she sat in her chair outside the van, waiting in the January chill for Eve to work the wheelchair lift. The poignant white-crested wren of her, with her crumpled spine and oxygen tubes, the vulnerability of her, waiting for this uniformed stranger to cart her off in a van. Bafflement and worry flickered on her face behind the clear plastic oxygen mask that was two or three sizes two big for her. She seemed, here in the driveway, to droop and sag, to wither in the cold. Her feet, in size 7 pink terry-cloth slippers with a silk bow, barely reached the toeholds. You could make out the jut of one of her shoulder bones, like a stick near her tangle of white hair.

Yet even then–even so feeble that she could barely keep her head up, what I noticed was that she was startlingly and heartbreakingly herself. The bright candle of her. Her avidity toward life; a wanting to see things, to miss nothing–even as she automatically edited out, by instinct or sheer will, every unsettling detail.

My mother. It was, in truth, the secret of her, the core: this gift, or need, for being curious and open to life while also discarding the bad bits like so much dirt and grit in a gold prospector’s pan. That, and her knack for spinning the rest–the tailings, the flecks of gold, the bits she liked–into anecdotes, by turns pastel or snappy, often with a self-dramatizing twist: mom as The Heroine in the Grocery Store. For years, I rolled my eyes, cringing at what I saw as my mother’s silliness, her irrelevance, her falsity and pretense; more profoundly, I have raged against–and struggled to maintain my bearings against–the air-brushed gloss she brought to every account, every recollection, of our family’s troubled and traumatizing history.

But this is who my mother was. Her vibrancy and her sunny-side-upness stood in contrast to–and not only as a defense against–the unendurability of her humdrum and unhappy circumstances. A selective memory and a nimble imagination were her saving graces; she could keep her eyes and mind and heart open to the world because she possessed a fearsome talent for masking and retouching and rewriting it. The sure, if limited, triumph of it. Her way –as the years passed grindingly on, as the bad marriage threatened to crush her–of managing to be resilient, and even hopeful. Her way of keeping supple and alive all the warmth and joy and music that were in her when she started out.

As she was wheeled from hospital bed to elevator, the lively light of her was wan, but there it was. I saw and felt it–her spark of interest in the adventure of it all, in the minor frisson of excitement that attended her slow sail down the the fourth-floor corridor with her entourage–the solicitous attendant in her black-and-white paramedic’s outfit, the blue-jeaned daughter with tears drifting down her cheeks. I saw her eyes brighten, this bent and blanket-swaddled wraith who was my mother; this tiny white-haired wren of a woman gliding along the hospital hallway, for a purpose and destination she’d already forgotten, the corridors clearing for her rolling chair with its trailing tubes, for her entourage, for her pair of oxygen tanks.

Inside the van, though, confusion and anxiety bloomed. Her quicksand memory up to its usual tricks, resetting every ten seconds. “Where on earth am I going?” And again: “Now, tell me: where am I going?”

I stood there in the driveway, my heart breaking for her. I would be following the van in a separate car; across the driveway, on the apron of a parking ramp, I could see A. in our black Accord, handing a parking ticket to the attendant. I remained shivering by the transport van–it resembled an airport van but without seats– waiting with my mother in her chair as Eve fussed with brakes and bolts. The wheelchair and its blanketed cargo looked forlorn and puny in the middle of the van’s interior, and as Eve pushed and pulled at the the chair’s wheels, I suddenly pictured my strapped-in mother careering crazily around the van as it zoomed at 60 miles an hour down the freeway, spinning haplessly in an ersatz tilt-a-whirl. I leaned into the van. My mother seemed to be growing smaller by the minute. “Just tell me,” her weak voice said to me, again, “Where is it that I’m going?”

I leaned in; I tried to explain about the care center, just a short trip, a place for you to get better, don’t worry, the place you were last summer, you liked it, just a short trip, you’ll be fine, I’ll be there. I stayed there, leaning in, as Eve finished anchoring my mother’s chair and began to pull the van door dangerously close to my head. Even as she slid behind the wheel, started the engine, I was leaning, talking to Eve through the van’s window, offering up utterances the sturdy paramedic could use to reassure my mother on the journey: “Don’t worry,” she was to say. “We’ll be there soon. Your daughter will be waiting for you.”

She was much more, of course, than the weakly wasting she-gnome in a nursing home bed, her hair gone white, her back stooped, her wrists like twigs and her nostrils flaring oxygen tubing. The woman in that bed herself offered a few clues, stirring from sleep with a radiant smile, wanting CNN on the TV, making endearing and funny chat with the young male aide bringing her meals, the nurse bending to check her bedsore, the daughter who arrives with sweaters and a fake peony from Target.

A bony slip of a thing with her lungs failing and her mind going fickle, yet still the smart and funny remarks, the unerring sense of comic timing, the wanting to know about the daughter’s life (and reasking the questions, when the answers quickly vanish in her head, with the same generous attentiveness), and the spirited, if much-repeated, anecdotes, disproportionately drawn from the earliest, happiest decades of her life—the charmed childhood years in a lake-dotted city neighborhood with her musician parents and her swell big brother, the adventurous young adult years of a business career she relished and—in marriage to a deceitful and selfish man—lost.

In the checkout line at the food co-op this evening, after a trip to the movies, starting to bag my yogurt and pommellos, spinach and pasta, I suddenly found it difficult to breathe. The thought, as I battled dizziness and panic, veering ever closer to full-fledged hyperventilation as the unwitting checker scanned items and asked me for my member ID, that maybe I was channeling my emphysemic mother, taking into myself her laborious and heartwrenching doggedness to draw even slender wisps of oxygen into her damaged lungs and to dispel the carbon dioxide always wanting stubbornly to lodge there.

Another odd experience earlier, both in the bread aisle and near the vitamins: Staff members troubling to ask me if I needed help with anything, an uncommon solicitude at my bustling food co-op.

Do I exude brokenness? Is my grief that open and tangible?

My mother died January 30. Can it have been a month ago already? Her death was not unexpected, but was unexpectedly expeditious. She succumbed to emphysema, finally out of breath for good after a journey of surpassing hardness. Her death in hospice, relatively peaceful and fast, was in no way beautiful, but in almost every way a grace granted. It took just a single dose of morphine, just a week into hospice care; she no longer labored quite so assiduously to draw breath into her remaining shred of lungs, and that was it.

But in truth, nothing about my mother’s dying was easy. It took three years, and mostly was a big mess of almost unendurable struggle. In the picture with my cheerfully addled but seriously ill mother was my unpleasantly impaired father, whose confusion tipped into meanness. He coped poorly, irrationally, and often belligerently with the crumbling of life as he had known it, requiring me to call in the Marines (or at least County Adult Protective Services). All of it was endlessly painful on so many levels, but particularly wrenching because my mother was a woman of such intelligence and heart and vitality, a bright and warm center that held, at least a little, in what can only be called a truly and remarkably dysfunctional family.

What there is now … what there is now is just tremendous loss, grief, and all that goes with it; there is just so much, and I feel so often just undone by it. “The loss of the ground note”–the title of a book I have seen about women losing their mothers.

She weighed 72 pounds and was bent nearly double by osteoporosis and the effort to draw breath into lungs ravaged by emphysema. She had both a bad end and an unfulfilled life.

Yet even in the final days, even as her breathing worsened and a stroke took her one of her eyes, even with her oxygen tubes and her dodgy memory, even–on the worst and coldest nights, with frost on the window–the light of her shone bright and warm, wavering only a little from the sheer fatigue of winding down; her pluck and cheer and “hello, lovey” greetings and slangy “I’m an old bag” banter making her a favorite of the nurses.