The hotel is nearly empty. No children racing down the hall to push the elevator button first. No cluster of coworkers speaking so loudly I know all their names. 

It is quiet.

This is the newest hotel in my hometown along the Gulf Coast; they don’t build new things here that often. If I had a front room, my view would be the mall I wandered through growing up: JCPenney, Dillard’s, KB Toys, Claire’s, and pictures with Santa and the Easter Bunny in the food court. The hub of entertainment in the 1980s. But my room faces the back of the hotel: air conditioning units, employee parking, and a grassy area with a live oak. The tree is taller than the four-story hotel, branches spread wide and thick like a giant’s hand reaching out of the ground; moss hangs from the fingers in long tangles.

I checked into the hotel ten days ago. I came to sit vigil with my three older siblings at our mother’s bedside because the hospice nurse said, It will be soon. We’ve received the same call twice before.

The hotel is just a chain, the same in thousands of towns, but it feels fancy to me. All the other times I’ve visited my mother, the only options were hotels four miles from the gulf, closer to the chemical plants. Carpets that stink as if soaked in the humid air tinted with salt and smelling of fish. Air vents and mini fridges rattling on and off. Truck engines rumbling in the parking lot. Always so noisy.

This hotel is quiet.

The mini fridge even has a mute button. Silent behind its cabinet door, it holds the chicken noodle soup, mac and cheese, and iced tea I had delivered yesterday. The hotel thermostat is fancy, too, with an easy-to-read digital display and large buttons clearly labeled: Heat on/off, AC on/off, Fan on/off. The screen reads 72℉. I set the fan to off.

It’s late January 2022, and artifacts of COVID-19 pandemic protocols linger. Signs reading masks encouraged but not required are peeling off the glass doors, and the dispenser of hand sanitizer by the elevators is always empty. Housekeeping is still upon request only, and I am grateful not to be disturbed. 

Four days ago—or was it five?—I sat in the parking lot of an urgent care waiting to take a COVID test from my car. The rapid test, a gentle swab up my nose that I administered myself, was negative. I requested the more accurate PCR test. A nurse twisted a long, abrasive tool into the deep interior of my sinuses. 

When I open the email with the results, I am not surprised. 

I text my husband: Stay home. 

I email my siblings, ending with I am turning off my phone until I figure out what this means for me. 

I am comforted by the undeniable evidence: positive for COVID. At least one circumstance of Mom’s last weeks cannot be revised by poor memory when, if, my family ever speaks of it again. 

The king-size bed dominates one wall of the room; the nightstand is the same width as the hotel phone. A long, narrow desk is attached to one wall with a rolling chair tucked underneath. A flat-screen TV affixed to the wall directly above the desk can be tilted to face the bed. Between the bed and the window is a couch of blue-grey cloth.

Before getting sick, I sat with my back pressed into the gentle curve at the center of the couch, my legs crossed underneath me and my laptop on the couch table. I would call my therapist, FaceTime with my husband, and eat the dinners I picked up curbside from local restaurants that didn’t exist when I lived here. But since getting sick, I rarely leave the bed.

I’ve watched the musical Hamilton twice, read the entirety of Kiese Laymon’s memoir Heavy, and listened to Disney’s Encanto soundtrack until I’ve cried every flavor of tears. Borrowing emotions from worlds outside my own titrates the overwhelm trapped in my body. 

As I crash into sleep, a scene from Hamilton pops into my head—chairs and papers and people fly in all directions while the floor spins in slow motion.

No one gets it right, my therapist said. That your mother dying is not something you get good at; it is something you do once and never do again. 

When I arrived ten days ago, I stood in the corner of Mom’s bedroom staring at the nurses cleaning and dressing and comforting a body with my mother’s voice. It is the same room, same king-size bed, she and my father shared. When he passed away at age sixty-two, they’d been married forty-four years. His death was both sudden and expected: a heart attack during his third remission with terminal bone cancer. I wasn’t there. When my paternal grandmother died at eighty-three during a hospital stay for pneumonia, I wasn’t there. When my maternal grandmother died at seventy-six, asleep in her recliner at home, I wasn’t there. Both my grandfathers died before I was born. 

Death is a foreign planet.

Every minute I was in Mom’s bedroom, I held my breath. 

I saw the scene from above. A living woman sits in a chair. A dying woman lies in a bed. No dialogue. Surely, a commercial break for car insurance or spring-fresh fabric softener would soon break the silence and prove it all a fiction. 

I had just begun to feel the gravity, just begun to anchor myself in the landscape of gray skin, raspy coughs, and the scent of baby wipes. I could hold Mom’s hand. I met with the lead hospice nurse. I learned to properly measure the morphine. Then my sister started coughing. The day after that, I began coughing. 

I am sweating.

I think I hear lyrics until I am conscious enough to realize it is a memory, not actual music. I check my temperature and scoff at the reading of only 100.9℉. I stand up, steady myself, and take two steps from the bed to the wall. I switch the thermostat from Heat to AC, pressing the down arrow to 68℉. I take one long step back to the bed and fall into the damp sheets.

Our family dynamics feel complex and unique, but everyone feels that way. Sibling relationships are snapshots taken at each new birth. You can tinker with the color and light, but the image remains. We are who we are. We can pretend things have changed, pretend we have all matured, until a storm hits—

Daughter. Son. Black sheep. Golden child. The Baby. The Oldest. The Middles. The sensitive one. The stoic one. The difficult one. The invisible one. The one denying the seriousness of COVID. The one following all the rules. The one whose criticism of others directly contradicts their own behavior. The one cleaning counters, running errands, greeting visitors, washing laundry, answering calls, and scooping cat litter to avoid the room where it will happen. The one who prays for more time. The one who prays for less.

I do not know how long I have slept. My phone is still off, and I don’t turn it on to check the time. I get up and pull on my sweatshirt, then switch the thermostat from AC to Heat, pressing the up arrow to 78℉. 

I could go back to Mom’s house. All the nurses have had COVID already anyway, my sister said. I could go back, wear a mask, and continue the debate with my siblings: Does Mom want to be in pain so she can whisper I love you one more time, or does Mom want the pain to stop so she can sleep until the end? 

We are who we are—no one can agree on an answer.

I will go back. I will eat something. I will drink more water. I will take more Tylenol. I will steep in the fancy shower with good water pressure and endless hot water. I will put on my only remaining clean clothes besides the dress I bought for the funeral. I will drive the three miles to the house along the same route I walked to and from middle school. I will wear a mask until my mother and I are alone. Then, I will say I love you one more time, but not yet—

I crawl back into bed and collapse into the refuge of sweaty, shivering sleep. 

In the eye of the storm, it is quiet.