It was an uneasy stretch, her staring at the television, reading her Catholic Magazines, talking to her cats or to the dogs. Her anger had a presence aside from the presence of the person, building like the barometric pressure in that drier state she'd left. For all that she was humble and conscious of her feminine role, she had always been hard as rocks, tough as nails. It must have killed her to be sitting in that chair, looked after.

She had two sons in Ohio, a family of two, a family of four. Less than ten years since the eldest moved out of her home. But my mother was the only one who offered.

When her own mother died, she was so young. From the time she was scarcely ten years old, she was a mother, first for older and younger siblings who pulled their weight, went to work, while her primary task was domestic. She married a GI. They made a good life, sent the children to parochial school, a jar of maraschino cherries for a treat every Friday. We knew he was dying, but never how fast it would come. The phone rang early in the morning: Get on a plane. He's going.

This was the way it went with that family. Tragedy followed on the heels of tragedy, never leaving you time to recover from the previous. There was no urgency when she lost her son. He had been taken by the angry gods of a California freeway, helicoptered out but dead on arrival. Catholic women wail with the most heartbreaking conviction. My mother noticed us, told us it was alright to leave. We had loved him, but never watched him grow up, and our tears were paltry. Just like Grandpa, who died while we were on the plane.

The west coast stole her youngest children, and she was forever dedicated to wooing them back. Strong as my mother is, Grandma was always stronger. It was in eighth grade, for me, that my mother moved to Ohio, ostensibly to be with the family. When school was out, she came for my graduation and we all drove across the country. When we began to register for schools, it was a wild and scary adventure, something out of the trashy young adult novels that always lent divorce a dangerous glamour in their attempts to console and educate. When the court order yanked us back to Washington, I saw the dark hands of a subtle puppeteer beneath my mother's anger.

She never said much. Her longest conversations were with her daughter, behind the closed door of the master bedroom. Perhaps we never had much in common, I with my teenage tumult, she with her piety, her racism, her martyred shuffle. Her words were strange: "Let it set," "My, it's close today," "Barney, did you spit up on the carpet? You bad, bad boy." Or perhaps I was the latter day version of her biography, and we had too much in common, raising siblings, bringing home a paycheck for the family rather than for the shiny accoutrements of adolescence, both convinced we were owed more than the world would ever repay.

She moved out the summer before I went away to school, meaning we all moved out, as she'd paid most of the rent with her Social Security. Her house had been sold when she came west, so she went into a retirement home. During the following winter, she died.

She is past reproach.