for the matriarch

susan will die soon.

i can see it - her color is pale and mottled; her body shudders unconsciously.

i can smell it - the sterility of the hospital masks the worst of the sour backdrop.

most of all, i can hear it -

the slowing breaths,

the shallow struggle,

the apnea.

five,

six,

seven,

eight seconds

from exhale to next inhalation.

i remember to listen for this.

to count,

to wait, and

to listen.

my partner reads from a book she bought for me on my birthday. it is by a rabbi offering insight and wisdom on death and dying. she talks about the history and intention of the kaddish, and

i try to think back to just earlier today when the hospital rabbi read the kaddish to susan. did i feel anything significant?

i don't recall feeling anything at all. i don't even remember what was said.

she read it in hebrew for susan, who had made a lifelong study of the language, and english for the rest of us.

i would have to look it up to tell you a single part.

what i do remember are our tri-weekly tête-à-tête.

chess usually. sometimes that pattern game, set.

always conversational collaboration, and

plenty of shit-talking.

"i'm ready to play," she would say.

"i suppose i could stand to beat your butt, again." i'd laugh.

"ho, ho, ho," she'd mock, "just get the game, and we'll see about that."

she had never played chess before, but she wanted to learn. she loves the queen's gambit, "that movie about the lady who plays chess." of course, i always won; she's a 90-year-old with dementia. but the goal wasn't to win, it was to connect.

and connect we did.

i came to know that the matriarch of the family i married into is impishly funny, devilishly clever, bitingly sharp, and whip smart.

i heard the way she loves her kin and how she worked to preserve the sanctity of their time together: organizing and paying for vacations, hosting relatives in her home, welcoming new members to the family with ease.

i witnessed the deterioration of her condition wear on the once close ties that bound distant relatives together; saw the separation that grew as her ability to lead the charge diminished.

but i understand why her family now flies for days on end to be by her side before she transitions. why they drive for hours through the night. why they hold her hand and stroke her hair and rub her furrowed brow until it relaxes again.

because she is a mighty woman.

a true, caring, and compassionate friend.

a mother,

in the truest sense of the verb.

someone who has cultivated love her whole life,

and will be surrounded by it until the very end.