When I was 19, my father died suddenly and totally unexpectedly from a cerebral haemorrhage– at the age of 48. It seemed a lot older to me then than it does now. As he had largely been an absentee father, what was lost was the possibility of knowing what I had missed as a child, and knowing him as an adult. The conversations we had never had, and would never have.

My mother, on the other hand, has just reached the ripe old age of 87. She lives in Carrollton, Georgia, USA– on her own since her last husband’s death seven years ago.

I have made a point, come hell or high water, of visiting her each year, since she has been on her own. On these visits, we have had family reunions, met distant relatives, grieved together over the loss of her brother and sister in law, my uncle and aunt, shared meals, poetry, and old photographs.

My mother never had the luxury of an education as I did. She had to leave school at 13, though she loved it, to take care of her new baby sister. That baby sister, now in her 70s, takes care of her now, driving her on her weekly trips to lunch and the supermarket– the only places she ever goes.

Agnes, my mother, has always regarded an old person as “someone 10 years older than you are.” She didn’t like going to the local Seniors Club for lunch, because she didn’t want to hang around with all the old people. Blessed with good health all her life, only recently has she suffered the indignities of medical need.

Her intelligence is acute, honed by reading all of the newspaper every day. And while she had osteoporosis and high blood pressure, she was coping very well until last winter.

Last winter she was faced with a series of problems that had me worried sick. She fell and broke a tooth, and had to wait three days in agony before her dentist would see her. She slipped off the end of her bed and broke her left hip and had to have a replacement.

When that was just healing, she began to have pains in her heart and had to have an artery cleared. That was followed by a couple of heart attacks and a triple heart bypass. And lots more medication to take.

Just when my sister and I were relieved that she had survived and was out of the hospital she tripped and broke her left leg in three places. She was proud after the heart operation that the doctor had said she recovered faster than his other patients, most of whom were much younger.

But, finally, she began to recognize that she was not superhuman. While she still has tapered, polished nails, the high heels will never come out of the closet again, and she has succumbed to the humiliation of the walker.

It had been over a year since my last visit, when I saw her. She was pale and smaller, still (unlike me) stylishly dressed in matching colours, but the change was drastic. She could hear less well, and was so much more frail– vague, forgetful, alternately annoyed and depressed. It was as if my intelligent, happy, friendly mother had been replaced by someone I hardly recognized and who at first hardly remembered me.

Checking her medications, I found that she had been off one of her main blood pressure medications for over two weeks, because the bottle said ‘no refill.’ I moved heaven and earth to get her back on it– only to discover when she saw her ‘heart doctor’ that she had been put on double the desired dosage by her GP.

Finally, she was back on the medication and on the right dosage. We made her a chart of what she had to take when, how much and why.

But it was as if some kind of veil had fallen between us, as if she had taken one step closer to death, and one step beyond me. It was harder this time to reconnect. She had been through so much. She always liked to do the cooking and washing up herself (I didn’t ever do either well enough) but now I found myself doing all the cooking and cleaning without the usual complaints from her.

It took a while, but with her medication adjusted, we began to connect again, sharing old stories, telling jokes, looking at family photos of the many gone beyond. And the old rapport and love reasserted itself, though the beautiful woman my mother had been was now well hidden in old age.

She told me that when she went to hospital with the broken hip, the doctors would not give her any pain medication until she was to be seen the next morning. In agony, what kept her going was the sound of ‘Amazing Grace’, her favourite song, being sung in the next room.

In the morning she asked the nurse, ‘was that a radio or a real choir in the next room, singing during the night?’ The nurse replied, ‘there was no music in the hospital last night.’

She told me that she heard the music clearly, and it made her lose all fear of death. She wants to talk about death now, her next journey. She has decided against cremation, preferring to be buried in the old family cemetery in Kennesaw, Georgia with her mother, and her baby brother, Harry, who died at three years, from cholera.

Whenever I find myself impatient at shouting at her three times, and she still can’t hear me, or want her to sit down instead of muddling around the tiny kitchen helplessly in her walker while I cook, I think how lucky I am to still have her. I never forget that each time we say goodbye, may be the last time on this earth, anyway.

Above: Agnes Brown at 87 before her triple heart bypass.