Still Breathing, Yet It's Goodbye

Goodbyes are meant to be the easy grief.
You hug. You promise to write.
You believe you'll meet again.
Even in death —
a door that shuts, a last breath drawn,
a date etched in stone.
Something to hold onto
and call closure.
But what do you call this:
my mother, in the next room, breathing,
asking me who I am, what day it is.
I say I’m your daughter and it is Tuesday.
Four minutes later, she asks again.
Her tea goes cold in her hands.
At two in the morning,
she tries the wrong keys in the wrong door,
certain her parents are waiting up for her.
Her life, however it was, was hers —
fought for, and given away
in pieces too small to see.
There was a woman who raced across finish lines,
argued down bullies,
raised us on a meagre wage.
Now she studies her own reflection
like a stranger's face
and asks it, politely,
if it has eaten, how it is and what day is it.
It was not supposed to end like this:
her body is still here,
but the woman in it is leaving,
one room at a time.
Some days I catch myself wishing it were over —
not because I want her gone,
but because I want her whole,
her dignity still intact
in whatever days are left,
not stretched so thin across the goodbye
that there is nothing of her left
to bury with it.
Grieve I will, one way or another —
that was never the question.
Then I hate myself for wishing it,
for clock-watching her leaving
while she is still breathing in the next room.
Here was a woman who never let the world win —
who woke up hopeful anyway,
smiling anyway,
took life by the horns
before the tea was even poured.
Now it is her own mind she is wrestling,
and some mornings I see it behind her eyes:
she knows she is going.
She hates herself for it too.
So, tell me when I am meant to say goodbye.
Not while she still surfaces
and knows my face.
Not after,
when there is no one left to hear it.
So, I say it now,
mid-sentence,
into a room she has already left.
Goodbye, Ma. I love you.
It does not need to be heard
to be true.
When her last breath finally comes,
I will grieve —
but quietly, a part of me will already know:
I lost her years ago.
I lost her a little more
each Tuesday.
The cruelty was never the dying.
It was that by the time
goodbye was true,
there was no one left
to say it to.