Mom - May 22.

Today is Mom's birthday. She would've been 86. She died in 2005, age 80. She had a brilliant mind and huge heart. Although we had some differences of opinion, I think of her daily and miss her still. A bouquet of yellow roses rests beneath some redwoods on a trail she and I hiked together in the East Bay Regional Parks. Some tears mark my presence but I felt her there, too; she often is.

It never gets easier.

Recently, I was given a prompt for writing -- "Tell me where you will never be again" -- and the following is what poured out, unedited, unrevised.

I will never be in Portland in the fall after returning from a fantastic ten-day trip to Paris with my partner. I will never be there, in Portland, in September, after that trip watching my mother die in her bed. I will never visit her every day and hold her hand and caress her thin graying hair. nor smell that acrid scent of age and life that's slipping away. I will never be in that dimly lit room in Portland, during the first week of September, covering up my Mom's frail body as she does uncontrollable, brain-forced abdominal crunches in her bed.

These are half-crunches she relentlessly does that I could never do for the prolonged up-and-hold pauses. I tried in my hotel room the first day after returning to Portland and returning to my Mom's bedside, just a few days from my Paris trip. I collapsed into a sobbing puddle of loss and departure.

I will never be in Portland during those beautiful end-of-summer days rushing over to spend the final barren minutes with my Mom, recalling, even briefly that just days before I was surrounded by lush flower shops swarming with colorful, fresh-cut flowers. Where we and other people around us leaned on round, marble-topped tables, sipped luscious, frothy cafe au laits, nibbled on delicate, buttery croissants, and the Parisians endlessly smoked French cigarettes, the deathly trail of blue smoke weaving through their V'd Franco fingers. Mom loved Paris; she loved the history of Van Gogh's life there and followed it backwards, per se, to The Netherlands. I will never have those thoughts of Paris, of Mom, with Mom as her life slipped away beside me in that room again.

I know that I will never again be in Portland during those sweltering days, holding my mother's chilled hand and watching her squint and grimace at something high over the foot of her bed, when I felt the chill of death's scythe above me. I know that I will never be there in that place in Portland, sensing a final goodbye and the reality that her birthday will never be celebrated again.