My mom had been telling me something for a while.
She kept saying I needed more in my life than just work and kids.
Not because she doubted me as a mother — she never did. My kids were my world. But she worried about how tightly I held everything together, how little room there was for anything that wasn’t responsibility.
She reminded me that life was short.
That I was allowed to want time.
Time that wasn’t about being needed.
So she started keeping the kids overnight every Tuesday.
That Tuesday felt ordinary.
I was dressed nicer than usual — a black dress, my hair done, makeup on. She noticed immediately. She kept telling me how beautiful I looked, over and over, like she wanted me to really hear it.
At one point, she asked if I wanted to wear her wedding ring for a little sparkle.
I brushed it off.
“Mom, why would I wear your wedding ring out?” I laughed. “It doesn’t even fit.”
I rushed out the door.
And if I’m being honest, I don’t think I hugged her. I don’t think I kissed her goodbye. I said goodbye to everyone all at once and kept moving.
I went on with the rest of my evening without a care in the world.
The next day — February 4, 2020 — my kids got off the bus and walked into the house.
They found Nana sleeping on the couch. That wasn’t unusual. She did that sometimes. They dropped their backpacks. Changed their clothes. Started their routines.
My brother Tyler lived at home with my mom. That morning, he had gone to work after the kids left for school. He came home around the same time they did — expecting a normal afternoon.
My youngest — just days away from turning seven — was the one who realized something wasn’t right.
Nana wouldn’t wake up.
The first call they made was to me.
I panicked immediately and told them to call 911. I wasn’t far from the house, and I arrived just after EMS did. They told me to meet them at Wesley Hospital.
I called my brother Donny as I drove. I gave him the details I had, my voice shaking. I can still hear the fear in that call — the kind of fear where you want your mom, and instead you’re racing to save her.
Donny and I both arrived at the emergency room before the ambulance.
We were standing there waiting when the doctors pulled us aside. They told us they needed to run tests and assess what was happening — but her breathing was not conducive to life.
If they didn’t place her on a ventilator, she would die.
There was no decision to debate. How could there be? It was our mom. We had no answers. No explanation. No way to know what had caused this.
There was no universe where we didn’t fight for her.
While still in the ER, before she was moved to the ICU, a chaplain came in to pray over my mom — and over us.
Before he left, he pointed to her hand.
“Make sure you don’t leave your mother’s wedding ring on her finger while she’s unconscious,” he said gently. “You wouldn’t want to risk it being lost.”
I remembered the night before. Her asking me to wear it. Me saying no.
I slid the ring off her finger and put it on my pinky — the only finger it would fit — and didn’t take it off.
I told myself I would keep it safe until she woke up.
Then I would give it back to her where it belonged.
They ran test after test, trying to figure out what had caused her condition — and whether she would recover, or if this would be her new baseline.
At one point, she was breathing on her own. Her eyes were open, but she wasn’t responsive the way you hope to see. They decided to remove the breathing tube and see how she did.
I kissed her. I told her I loved her. I went home for the night.
Not long after, I got the call.
My mom was in respiratory distress.
If the breathing tube wasn’t replaced, she would die. But repeated intubation wasn’t safe — the risk of injury and infection was too high. They told us she would need a tracheostomy. And realistically, a feeding tube.
It felt unreal. We still didn’t know why this had happened. How could we stop fighting when we didn’t even understand what we were fighting?
My mom had fought her whole life for us.
There was no way I was giving up on her.
Outside those hospital walls, the world kept moving.
I was working twelve-hour shifts in healthcare, testing patients for COVID. Shelves were empty. Fear was everywhere. Every day carried the weight of exposure — not just for me, but for my kids, my mom, my family.
Life didn’t pause.
It collided.
My kids had already seen something they never should have had to see. They had walked into a moment they couldn’t understand, only feel.
In that moment, I wasn’t able to be what I wanted to be for them. I was terrified. I was watching my own mother fight for her life, and there was no part of me that knew how to hold all of it at once.
At some point, the decisions changed.
At some point, the fight stopped being about survival and became about comfort.
At some point, hospice entered the room.
And at some point, my mom died.
This story doesn’t end neatly. It doesn’t resolve cleanly.
It ends where it ended for me — in the middle of grief, responsibility, survival, and a season that changed everything about who I am.
