BEFORE I KNEW HIM well I saw Jon’s face and thought, oh, it’s you. It seemed impossible, improbable, and then, effortless. Years passed, drawn out and blinking. We grew up around each other like plants, budding arms entwined and reaching for the light. Now, fingers fit to the blades of shoulders, the valleys of palms. We push furniture to the perimeter of the loft we live in, play our song on a loop. I move backwards down a path I can’t see.

Soon we will wed in my dying mother’s garden and it will be a big affair. The guest list is large, the tent is wide and white. My mother, still well for much of the year preceding the wedding, reserved it along with one hundred sets of knives and forks, champagne flutes and water glasses, napkins. She also rented long tables and linens, a dance floor to assemble over the grassy lawn and white globe lamps to hang like fluorescent moons from the trees and tent poles, casting us in their glaring light.

I think I’ve taken care of the big stuff she tells me over the phone in March and I, bogged down by midterm papers to grade and stories to read, thank her for her services. Within a month she is bedridden by a fatigue she can’t name. What can I do, she asks, her voice faded, meek. Nothing, I tell her, you rest. The truth is I have no clue what else she could help with or even what I myself should do to plan this wedding. So, I do little, plan little, focus on nothing besides the dance.

In the months before the wedding, my mother reminisces a lot. She speaks in non-sequential clips about what it meant to be young, when she was young. We thought we were so subversive, she says, shaking her head, talking about the porno flicks she attended with a big group of friends. They lived in New York. It was the early seventies. They only ever made me feel bad about myself, she adds, touching her fingertips lightly to her sternum.

So many of my mother’s memories are colored by her body, by her experience of it as fat or thin, desired or unwanted. I remember her standing in front of her bedroom mirror, lifting the skin of her forehead and saying what do you think, just a little tuck? I remember her doing this even after she got the facelift, a procedure she tells me she never regretted. And I remember the diet fads—Atkins, Weight Watchers, macrobiotic—all designed to undo the seemingly ancient belief she had in her own chubbiness, which was itself a myth.

You were never fat, her friends told her when her body first changed, when the cancer first came, years ago now. They sat around her kitchen table, offering up their wrists for comparison. This, my mother always said, is the ultimate test for bone size, which in turn is the ultimate determinate of one’s thinness. To be fragile, birdlike, is the epitome of beauty and it is what men want, she believed, even as she criticized other women’s bodies for these qualities. She’s too thin, she would say, exasperated by one friend or another. She said this to me as well – you’re too thin – after I grew into a lanky woman—by choice or by force, I no longer know. But when I was a child I was sturdy and stocky, big-boned.

As my mother declines, Jon and I take on more responsibility. It’s fine, we tell each other, we can plan it all ourselves. We spend an afternoon at an outdoor café, budgeting and list making. We sit side by side and talk and it is lovely, to feel this close, this dedicated to the same project.

Then it’s time for me to go run errands and for Jon to tutor the student he sometimes helps with papers. He often comes home from her sessions exhausted because this student shares with him intimate details of her life and cries and he feels awkward because he doesn’t know what to do.

When she arrives at the café, I see the student is a woman my age, and beautiful, red nailed, her auburn hair swept up off her face. Maybe I’m remembering her as more glamorous than she was, but I recall thinking as I rose to shake her hand that I was glad I wore this dress, short and black and high-necked but cut around the arms to hint at the sides of my breasts.

Jon introduces me as his fiancée, but the woman insistently calls me his girlfriend. She goes inside to buy a coffee before they get started and he kisses me extra hard as I pack up my things to leave them to it.

In the grocery store, at the dog park, I fantasize about betrayal. I watch men watch me in my short dress and want to show Jon how desired I am. When he calls me to say I can come pick him up, it is an hour late. I know my distrust disempowers me. Sometimes I want him to feel jealous, insecure, just to know what it’s like inside my skin. Sometimes I wonder if it’d be easier if he just got it over with and betrayed me, so I could stop anticipating how bad it would feel.

My father said my mother was crazy. He never admitted to his affair. Not even after my mother walked in on him with the other woman, who was, in fact, a teacher of mine. Not after I, his twelve-year-old daughter, saw them, too. Not even after my mother moved out and not after the passing of years—years over which the other woman became the primary woman, a change which failed her in the end. She spent some time in the retreat, my father said, speaking of the other woman one night when Jon and I visited, the three of us cupping wine glasses at the kitchen table. The retreat, in Vermont parlance, means she checked in – or was admitted involuntarily – to the local mental institution. Last I heard of her, my father said, she called up late at night from the Molly Stark motel, looking to buy a gun.

My mother was crazy and the other woman was too. But I was not. You’ve got your head screwed on right, my father would say, his words an affirmation of my difference, my exception from the betrayal all women seemed destined for. But to hedge my bets, I started to fill my journals with tallies of calories. At night, I splayed out copies of Seventeen and practiced the looks they suggested in the bathroom mirror, learning the mandates of my face in mascara swipes and the arty flicks of the eyebrow pencil stolen from my mother’s bathroom. I wanted to fulfill a feminine role and also, to eschew it. I watched in horror as my body developed, turning me into a woman with so much potential for madness, so much room for pain.

The week before my wedding, at a hospice nurse’s urging, I begin the task of packing my mother’s things. How morbid is this, I think as I box up her books, title after title telling a story of her lifelong quest for self-knowledge, self trust. The Dance of Anger, A Path with Heart, The Power of Now, The Artist’s Way, and an old copy of The Dream of a Common Language, by Adrienne Rich. The volume is thin, the pages stained and made brittle with age. Every poem is underlined, annotated, my mother’s prep-school perfect handwriting edging the margins. Great mother, vessel, medicine, poison, she writes, terrible mother of denial who can kill the possibility of living, risking and wounding the questing spirit. Suffering as a container.

Suffering as a container. The questing spirit. Denial of self, denial of the truth, denial of others out of fear of risk and wounding. Power comes from trusting ourselves, feeding our bodies, our questing spirit, my mother wrote, not from withholding.

But this power, the power my mother identified in Rich’s work, was the power she could never completely access. I watched her try, in the years before she left my father, clenching her jaw when he berated or belittled her, silencing herself in response to his anger. I picture her, a year before she left, throwing away a Tupperware of leftover pasta she thought had gone bad, while my father watched, waited, then accused her of waste. I imagine her rolling her shoulders back and turning to face him. But in reality, she cowered, caved in on herself, and fished the noodles out of the trash, put them on her plate. I wanted you to have your family intact, she told me once, I stayed for you. But what I wanted from my mother was her anger, her confidence, her hysterical, violent protest.

In the margins of my mother’s Adrienne Rich book are repeated mentions of Inanna and Ereshkigal, who were Sumerian goddesses and sisters. In the myth of their relationship they live apart, Innana in heaven, as queen of the earth, and Ereshkigal in the underworld, queen of the dead. When Ereshkigal’s husband dies, Innana regales herself in her finest jewels and prepares to journey to the underworld to attend the funeral rites. Knowing this, Ereshkigal instructs her servant to refuse entry to Innana at each of the seven gates leading to the underworld, offering her entry only when she surrenders a piece of clothing or jewelry as payment for her passage. By the time Innana arrives in Ereshkigal’s throne room she is naked, stripped of her power and Ereshkigal fasten(s) on Innana the eye of death, and hangs her corpse from a meat hook. Inanna is saved by her own foresight, the trust she put in those she loves to send aid to the underworld if after three days she did not return. They do and her corpse is reclaimed, her life resurrected.

Like other descent monomyths, the story of Inanna and Ereshkigal was interpreted by Jung and Campbell as the story of journeying into the shadow of our own selves – the doubt and fear, the old festering wounds – and emerging reborn; it is, they wrote, the story of the creative process, the artist’s way, the path with heart, the path towards love. I want to go into Ereshkigal’s mouth, my mother wrote in the margins, I want to go into her eyes.

Cast in a shadow she couldn’t escape: this was how my mother always saw herself. It was other women who were desirable and good. She wanted to become them, the other women, and tried on different versions of herself throughout her life, overhauling her wardrobe at times, acquiring a collection of mis-matched outfits and shoes, or splurging on makeup she wore once or twice before discarding. She did this especially in the year before she left my father, transforming over the course of a weekend with friends in D.C. from my authentic mother—what I think of as authentic—in her flannel button-downs and paint splattered blue jeans, to a made-over version of herself, her wild curls cut short and straightened, her lips penciled in, the clothes of her artist-self replaced with tidy Stepford wife suits. I was eleven. I cried when I saw her. But my father barely noticed. He didn’t want her, not in her button-downs and wild hair, not in her suits.

Two weeks before the ceremony, my mother spikes a fever or vomits uncontrollably for so long that we say enough and insist she go in to the hospital, if only for a little while, so she can get her strength up for the wedding. It is a relief to have her there, where we know she is safe. But then the Dilauded and Fentanyl, the psychotropic Haldol they administer because nothing they give can stop the vomiting which plagues her on an ever-shortening reel. She keeps vomiting, loses her mind, slipping through holes in space-time, conjuring long forgotten memories as if by magic. The “g-tube” they implant in her side to drain the brown acid before she can throw it up never works, appearing instead as a stinking appendage, another malfunctioning feature of my mother’s body.

In the wake of my mother’s first leave-taking, a period my father refers to now as the dark days, he showered me with praise, like he’d been stocking up compliments he needed to get rid of. I was, it seemed, everything my mother was not. To be specific I was, and remain to this day, drop dead gorgeous, sexy, beautiful, in my father’s eyes. But these words, more suited for a lover than a daughter, have never been enough. They have never been enough I suppose, because they are more suited for a lover than a daughter, but also because I can never believe my father, and the knowledge of this lives inside me.

That the man I marry is not in awe of me may be a good thing.

This is what I tell myself. I am tangible to him, I am real. At least I think I am. But then again, he’s never seen me prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss; he’s never seen me fall apart, get too fat or thin, too sad or scared. And what would happen if I did? What will happen when I lose my mother, the only person besides him I can depend on? It’s sick, I know, but I’ve sometimes imagined what I’d do if Jon cheated, lied, left. I’ve fashioned a plan in which I return to my mother, sleep for days in her attic, then emerge, reborn. The imminent absence of this escape hatch feels now, on the verge of matrimony—an institution designed to provide security—like an added risk.

It’s the week before my wedding and my mother arrives home from the hospital to splay on a rented electric bed in the sunroom, hospice nurses coming and going, hopping her up on everything they give for comfort, everything they give when there is nothing left to do.

During this time, I find myself befuddled. Never having dreamed of marriage, I’m not sure how to approach my own. Not to mention my own in the face of loss. What kind of dress do I wear for this wedding cum funeral? What about makeup and hair? How do I present myself as I become a wife? An orphan? How do I reflect my preparedness for these new roles?

I try to pose these questions to my mother, but she lolls, sedated, on her sweaty cot. While she was admitted they pumped her full of saline, so that her body, once cancer-thin, now resembles an inflated plastic glove, translucent-white and reaching. She calls to me where I sit in the next room, staring at a blank screen. And I am annoyed to get up and go to her, to hold her hand while she says now, let’s talk about this, but loses her train of thought when I try to address the questions at hand.

So, I make decisions on my own. Rather than organize a shopping trip to an actual store, and face dress sizings alone, I order multiple options online, none of which fit right. Rather than leave my hair long and curly, as it always is, I hire a woman to come to the house and sweep it into an updo someone else would wear. And instead of going barefoot, as I secretly wish to do, I buy sky-high satin heels I can’t walk in and certainly can’t dance in—their addition to my ensemble causing all sorts of problems.

You want to look like yourself, Jon says when he sees me with my hair up, a trial run to make sure it holds. And when he sees the blue pumps his eyes widen. They’re very Texas, he says, not a compliment.

After my mother’s second surgery, in 2004, she lived symptom free for three years before she needed another operation, this time to de-bulk the liver and the small intestine, which the surgeon removed almost entirely, relegating her to the “short bowel syndrome” she lived with for the rest of her life—a total of seven years. After this surgery, unable to properly digest her food, a team of gastroenterologists prescribed a bevy of nutritional regimens designed to keep weight on. I remember my mother in her kitchen, sprinkling sugar on a bar of butter then spooning it guiltily into her mouth. In the afternoons she ate brownies and cake with abandon then ran to the toilet to shit them out.

When my mother’s body first began to lose itself this way, from the inside out, she enjoyed the change, seemingly unaware of its ominous foreshadow. She enjoyed her slender waist, her smaller breasts, even as she plugged in her nightly bag of TPN, the supplemental nutrition eventually prescribed to keep her alive. Each night she fed off that sack of milky fluid, which hooked to a permanent IV line, threaded into the skin beneath her collarbone, and pumped directly to her heart.

But the TPN proved insufficient. She diminished anyway. To prevent the bruises that she began to incur from sleeping on her newly bony hipbones, she tucked cushions beneath her sheets. She was always cold. Still, she called to tell me how addictive it was, this weightlessness, how thrilling. This is the body I’ve always wanted, she said, ashamed, but honest. This was the body of the other woman she’d always tried to become. But when the men arrived, old and lonely and interested, she pushed them off, citing illness. It didn’t matter. She was happy on her own. It was enough for her, to know she was desired.

At times I have thought this is all any of us needs: desire, and the knowledge that it’s also directed at us. To be wanted, I guess, is pivotal. The absence of desire is what my mother defined as responsible for her divorces. Her first, before my father, was from a man who came to terms with his homosexuality a year in.

The certainty of her first marriage’s end was what my mother mourned as her second marriage faltered. Trying to save it, she signed up for dance lessons, the thought being that physical teamwork would draw my father closer. But for some reason she included me in these lessons, inadvertently making herself a third wheel as my father and I banded together, rolling our eyes at the flamboyant instructor in his polyester shirts and blonde toupee.

I remember my parents, bodies entwined, leaning away from each other’s touch as they traversed the dance floor.

My wedding day arrives, overcast and ominous. Jon and I have a dozen friends already camping in the backyard, and a houseful of family. The wedding will be large, we’ve known this. But we haven’t really made a plan for it, spending our time setting up the campsite and organizing my mother’s care instead. The day before the ceremony, when it’s still sunny and warm, we proceed to the garden to go over what we’ll say and where we will stand. But the next day the choreography is made moot by the weather and, we suppose, we’ll have to do it in the tent with the dinner smell and the awkwardly assembled sound system, complete with a laser light show which zigzags across the canvas ceiling in fluorescent purple and green.

As Lindsey, the hairstylist, wrestles with my hair, warped into frizz by the humidity, I watch clouds gathering outside the window and laugh with my girlfriends and contemplate tears. I just want the whole thing to be over. I just want to see my husband. I just want the mother of my childhood, clear-eyed and confident.

In the mirror, I am someone else. I am bridal. Almost immediately I want to rip out the bobby pins which contain my usually untamed mess of hair (and by the end of the night I will) but for some reason I don’t just yet, and shake my way down the stairs, holding a bouquet someone hands me, teetering on my too-high Texan heels.

If you want to see your mother now is the time, someone tells me as I descend. Yes, I want to see my mother. I am guided to the sunroom where she lays, fully dressed and primped, her friends having spent the entire day readying her for the ceremony she is determined to attend. She is determined to attend the ceremony despite the near constant vomiting which still plagues her. Just in case, they’ve placed a blue elephant trunk vomit sack in the pocket of the long beaded jacket they’ve dressed her in. It pokes out, a wrinkled shock of blue against the sunset color of her coat. I am speechless at the sight of her, and though I shove the thought away the moment it arises, I am embarrassed. She looks fat and pasty, a water-logged corpse, her makeup funereal, her wrists and ankles swollen with edema. She doesn’t seem to care, strange given her life-long preoccupation with her weight, but comforting, how little it matters in the end. Still, the next day she’ll be exhausted. The hospice nurse will nick her ankle with a butterfly needle and for days it will drain her body like a spigot, droplets of water soaking her bandages and bedsheets. By August she’ll be skeletal again and again, it won’t matter.

My little girl, she says, as I lean over her bed in my ugly wedding dress, saying mommy, repeating the word to calm the blood pounding my torso, my head. In that moment, I am exhausted. I want only to curl in bed beside her, melt into her body as I did in my childhood. But I withdraw, afraid of ruining my makeup. Then she is gone, swept away by her friends, who carry her distended form to her seat in the tent.

During the ceremony, I wonder if my mother can see me, or if she’s only gazing through me, her mind occupied by opiates, hallucinatory visions of her body, its future. I look back at Jon, swearing to be my heart’s companion, and think him beautiful, made more so by the yellow light of the tent, the storm beating at the outer walls.

When our vows are over, when our hands are clasped and Jon has swept me into a kiss to seal it all, the music starts up again. But the song is wrong. It is not, as it is supposed to be, our “exit music,” but rather the song of our first dance, slated for after dinner. Oh well, Jon says, and I kick off my shoes so we can two-step, which we do gracefully, our practice paying off. We twirl on cue, the crowd applauds. We whisk past my mother in the front row, looking stoned and peaked. As the song ends we rush out of our embrace to go to her, help her to standing, and guide her out of the tent even as the crowd surges forward, angling not for us, but for her, hoping I suppose, to say goodbye.

It is fitting, I think, that just as the progression of her illness was a slow creep, tumors growing in miniscule increments, over years, the process of my mother’s death is protracted. This is what she always said she wanted. Her own mother died young and quickly. My mother never said goodbye. When you were a little girl I used to pray, she told me once, please God if I have to get cancer let it be the slow kind, please let me have the time to say goodbye.

So, I suppose we have been lucky. We have said goodbye so many times. Maybe this is why, as the summer draws to an end, and work and school and students loom, I feel I can go home to Texas for a week to gather everything that’s fallen by the wayside. I make plans to leave her. A team of hospice nurses arrive as her constant companions in this last phase of her life and they are near angelic in their perfection, always placing their hands on my mother’s body with love.