The morning of my mother’s last day on earth the nurses didn’t notice her waif-like frame slip out the door, alarmed and shut, and make her way to the whale waters off Kauai, Hawaii. Some time later, she slipped back into her care home bed in the dementia wing and breathed some shallow breaths. At 5 a.m. the nurse asked how she was feeling and she whispered, “Grand,” onto the pre-dawn air. She gripped her rosary, the dark wood beads rising and falling through her fingers like the curved spine of a humpback breaking the surface, one last cresting before death.

The morning of my mother’s last day on earth the nurses didn’t notice her waif-like frame slip out the door, alarmed and shut, and make her way to the whale waters off Kauai, Hawaii. Some time later, she slipped back into her care home bed in the dementia wing and breathed some shallow breaths. At 5 a.m. the nurse asked how she was feeling and she whispered, “Grand,” onto the pre-dawn air. She gripped her rosary, the dark wood beads rising and falling through her fingers like the curved spine of a humpback breaking the surface, one last cresting before death.