Three days after my fourteenth birthday, my mother was given three months to live.

I remember the hot tears that ran down Daddy’s cheek, the way he clenched his jaw and looked out the window. I remember it feeling like my chest was sloshing with water, overflowing and burning, and how my heart felt so wet and hot, clanging around in my throat.

I didn’t believe him. I asked him if he was joking. I remember the tears getting thicker and congealing on the underside of my chin, at the stubble on his beard. My little sister held onto my hand and didn’t say a word because she couldn’t possibly know, and she let my fingers pierce into her as I buried my face in her baby-soft hair. Breathe in. Breathe out. Momma’s gonna die. Toddler-warmth, toddler-hair. Oh my God. Breathe.

She had a brain tumor. That I know, but not much else. I didn’t want to bring up the words around her and pierce her silk-fragile skin, and the doctor was cold and scary, and the one time I asked my dad his lips went corrugated-cardboard thin and his eyes told me to be quiet.

For months following the announcement (God, that makes it sound like a wedding) I was unable to touch anybody. Unable to talk to them. They talked to me, all right, and I made noises back, but they were in their own little slippery air bubble and I was out in the open, drowning and gasping as I tried to make sense of things. Of how my life had suddenly convoluted out of control and how I could no longer bring myself to care about the things that I had cared about before, and how my heart felt too heavy and swollen to be a high-schooler heart.

It’s hard to explain. I’m sorry I can’t do it.

I guess the best way to say it is that living with somebody who is dying is like living in your own personalized kind of hell.

She lived on for five months, actually, five months and six days. Sorry to spoil the ending, but did you really think some miracle would come and steal back time? I did, sometimes, maybe a lot of times, but that was because she was my mother and I was still a stupid little girl. In these instances, the least painful thing to do is hope.

In those five months and six days, I could do nothing right. I could not be happy, because my mother was going to die and every smile felt like it was going to snap in half like a rubber band and every laugh made me feel guilty. But I could not be sad, either-because my mother was going to die and I should not be wasting my only time with her that was left being sad about it.

I did not know what to feel.

All we could do was hold on to each other. Force life to run on as usual. My dad still drove to work. The bird-feeder was still filled every Wednesday, and coffee was still brewed fresh every morning, even when Momma could no longer drink it.

There were the ‘I love you’s. Always. Whenever somebody left the house, left the room, even in the middle of a sentence.

“I was thinking, Katie-Cat- I love you, you know that? Anyways, I was thinking we should rent that movie with that one actor you like-”

“You mean Dave Franco, mom? I love you.”

“Love you too, baby. Yeah. That Franco boy.”

I guess you could say that in those five months and six days, we were the definition of what a family should be. There was not enough time left to argue, to raise voices, to disagree. We cooked her favorite foods and Daddy still kissed her and called her beautiful even in the last days when she was so much of a corpse that we all knew she wasn’t, and I helped my baby sister draw her pictures of us all holding hands. Momma would hold us and kiss us and tell us that she never wanted to make us cry. She promised that, when she did die, she would send us some sign from heaven or wherever she went. She promised, in a rare shining gem of laughter, that she would make sure that I found the perfect husband, and that she would be there at me and my sister’s wedding. She promised. Bony fingers squeezing, eyelids pressing, sucking in air. She promised so hard, I think maybe it wore her out.

A small, horrible thought: Sometimes I wished we could just get it over with.

Another one: She does not know how much I cried.

We held hands and there were a lot of bad days when I honestly did not know how anything could ever be okay ever again, but we could hold on to each other, grasping and slipping and crying over worn bed sheets that smelled like thrift-store, and at the moment we were still okay. Because we were all together.

And then, one day, she died.

And I had gone for five months and six days thinking about it and thinking that I would be ready, but when it came I have to tell you:

Nothing. Nothing could have made it better.

I was in my bedroom. I was standing on my bedside table, using double-stick tape to put up poems clipped from unreturned library books on my wall. I ran out of double stick tape. I went downstairs to get some more. Daddy was out at the store with my baby sister. They were getting us a gallon of milk and some pita bread.

If you’re wondering, I did not sense it. Not really. There was already so much death in our house, all of it-the IVs, the medical smell, the grey fingernails and the milky medicine in our fridge next to the Soymilk-having creeped up without anybody noticing. I guess the smell of it was already there, so I did’t really notice when it solidified.

In those times, I was always thinking about my mother. So much so that it became a habit, and sometimes, as the days stretched on, I would even forget to be sad. This was one of those times.

And I was walking down the steps into the living room to tell her that I loved her before returning with the double stick tape.

It was raining. I was singing a Pussycat Dolls song when I walked into the room, and she didn’t say anything to me, and I thought it was because she might be asleep or she might be rolling her eyes at me or she might even be laughing.

But then I saw her.

Oh my God, she was so still.

My only thought: This is it.

Later, I would add more to the thought, like: This is it, she will never again say that she loves me. Or, this is it, Daddy will never be the same. Or, this is it, I have to throw out the Soymilk because she was the only one who ever drank it and she is no longer here.

But for then, that was all I could think.

In a sick kind of way, I want to hold on to that moment. Because now, especially a couple years after it happened, I have a hard time believing that it was all real.

I did not go into shock, start screaming, whatever you’ve seen in movies. I remember I immediately and quietly started crying, and I think I had already cried so much that I barely even noticed.

I remember my face crumpling in on itself, the words ‘I love you’ turning dirty and sticky and wretched in my mouth. I think my mouth was open. I’m not sure, but that would make sense.

The water in my chest overflowed. I was on my knees in front of her, pushing away the IV cords, the tape holding them to her body as white as her skin. I’m pretty sure I shook her once or twice, and I remember thinking that she was so stiff, and that books had described dead bodies as being stiff before, but I had never really understood that until then.

“Mommy.”

“Mommy, you’re dead.”

“Mom. Mom. Oh my God.”

I stopped talking then. I could not breathe and I felt sick and I felt her hips bones as I looked up at the ceiling. I’m not sure what I wanted to see. Maybe her soul, escaping like mist around the blades of the whirring ceiling fan.

I did not call the doctor, as I had been instructed to.

I did not call my father, because I wanted him to have a half hour more of happiness before his world caved on on itself.

Instead, I went to the kitchen sink and I threw up and I got myself a drink of water and I took a picture of her on my cellphone that I deleted right afterwards. I don’t know why I did that. And then I sat on my knees at the ‘Welcome’ mat right inside of the front door, waiting. I could smell her, now. The greyness. I could still feel her stiffness.

Confession (please don’t tell my Daddy): I did think about killing myself. When death is so close to you, it’s no longer so scary.

Daddy came home and he looked at me, all pale and small and curled up on the floor-I probably should have done something better, but really, I couldn’t-and his eyes went hard while the rest of him leaked out onto the floor.

“She...”

I nodded.

He didn’t let my baby sister see the body, so she stayed with me and looked at me with terrified eyes as I sobbed and tried to explain that mommy was in the sky.

I looked at the clock a couple of time, absently, wondering that time still went on while my mother didn’t, and it is for this reason that I know my father cried over her dead body for about and hour and ten minutes before he called the doctor.

The minutes passed. The hours passed, the days passed, the funeral passed, and all I did was hold onto my baby sister and cry. I would have liked to hold onto my father, too, but he was a grown man and he was crying so much that he was scaring me.

I guess I should have told you beforehand that my mother was very pretty. There is a certain brush that I never use because it still has her soft, blonde strands of hair stuck on it.

It’s been three years.

I’m crying, now, as I write this, and looking in the mirror my eyes are blue and there are two straight lines of mascara-stain, reaching to my neck. I’m wondering how I should end this properly. It is raining outside.

The truth is that there is no Dr.Phil happy ending. I still cry a lot, and my dad’s hands have never felt the same. My baby sister isn’t a baby anymore, and she doesn’t even remember mom, but sometimes she’ll crawl into my bed late at night because she is confused and I’m still so sad and together I guess we keep each other warm.

I don’t know where my mother is. She’s never sent that sign that she promised, or if she has, I haven’t noticed.

I don’t wonder anymore, why it was her, why it had to end like that. I don’t think about how my life would be different. I try to talk to her sometimes, but it’s the same as when I try to talk to God: there’s nothing there. Just myself.

I don’t blame her. Maybe there are rules in heaven.

You know, I used to love rain. I used to love my father, too, and I guess I still do, but he’s changed so much I can barely recognize him.

Why did you have to go and die, Mom?

You said you didn’t want to make me cry. You promised. You promised so hard.