Good-bye for now.

My mother ended every phone conversation with those words.

The thought of Mom’s tagline triggered another round of tears as I knelt on a twin-size mattress that lay on the the living room floor of my mom’s Eugene apartment a few days ago. It was 3 a.m. I could hear the faint sound of mom’s breathing coming from the bedroom.

Five minutes earlier, I had taken a syringe with morphine and gently squeezed the clear liquid into her mouth. I arranged a few pillows and applied some balm to her cracked lips. She hadn’t taken food or water for almost two days and hadn’t spoken for about 12 hours. Her skin looked waxy.

Her T-cell lymphoma had kicked into overdrive a couple of days earlier and, soon after, my phone jolted me awake. It was Mom.

“Kathy,” she said, “I think this is it. I need you to come right away.”

Mom had lunched the day before with friends at a restaurant. Yet now she was lying on her bedroom floor, unable to summon the energy to move, not remembering how she got there. An ambulance was on the way. Through the receiver, I could hear the faint sound of knocking on her apartment door that opens into the hallway at her independent living community in Eugene. She hung up. I jumped out of bed and started packing. She called again from the back of the ambulance and again from the ER. Those would be the last real conversations I would ever have with Mom.

In Eugene, after she was returned her apartment to hospice care. I, my sister and three brothers gathered around her, hoping for some kind of soul-lifting deathbed conversation, but Mom was attending to her last earthly task – dying quickly, without lingering. She opened her eyes and soaked in our love, but spoke no more. Days earlier she had told her caregiver, Melanie, she intended to go quickly. And so, here she was heading toward death like a bullet train racing to the next destination.

Dealing with a fresh onslaught of tears, I faced the reality that I would likely never hear her voice again or look into her blue eyes. We would never companionably watch another episode of Jeopardy or chat on the phone. I revisited the years with Mom in my mind as I wept.

She showed her mettle as a mom in the trenches. One day while teaching her youngest to drive, she stayed cool as Tom turned in front of an oncoming car and skidded to a stop with inches of daylight between vehicles. Mom looked at Tom, whose blood had drained from his face, and spoke coolly.“We won’t tell your father about this,” she said.

She arbitrated frequent fights that broke out in the bedroom shared by my sister and me. She dealt with her son’s antics and numerous trips to the emergency room for stitches. She sat through hundreds of concerts, ball games, water polo matches and track meets. She provided a model of motherhood that her children attempted to emulate when they themselves became parents.

Mom exercised her love of the English language by reading thousands of books and doing a stint as librarian at Churchill Estates, where she lived her last years. She enrolled in college late in her life, reveling in the fact that her fellow students were decades younger. She was a great lover of poetry and kept her brain sharp by memorizing verse. Until the end, her day started with a crossword and ended with Jeopardy.

Mom was inwardly impatient with those who were careless with the earth’s resources. She recycled before recycling was popular. She had a love of the underdog, championing causes through various civic and church groups that lifted up the poor, especially women and children and the homeless.

She and dad traveled the United States and the world. They enjoyed learning together about different cultures and natural wonders from Ireland to Australia to Turkey.

Mom could be stubborn. She rejected technology, insisting on a simple flip phone and refusing to use email no matter how much her children begged and cajoled. She favored traditional paper books to electronic readers. After the 2015 death of my dad, Sterling, a wiz on the computer who traded stocks online and set up auto bill pays, Mom went full Luddite, insisting her bills be sent by mail and paying by check. She was unapologetic.

Her family loved her anyway and she loved them relentlessly back.

And now I and my siblings are at sea. We are not the first to feel the ground shifting after losing a mother and we certainly won’t be the last. I refuse to believe we won’t see her again.

And so I say simply, “Goodbye for now.”