I want to carry her body. Be her legs and her hands. I want to step inside her and feel around, ultra-alert to all her aches and pains and what they might mean. Like a parent toward a child who is growing too damn fast, I want to freeze her in time, just as she is now. Or rather, I would like to turn back the clock. Back to when her hair was more black than grey. Back to when her fingers—untouched by arthritis—grasped firmly. Back to when she walked freely, without a swollen ankle and a limp. Oh, to be young with my mother this way forever. Or, if I had to make a choice, I would take her place. I would give her a do-over, an extra thirty years.

The tenuous glue that holds together the pieces of my immediate family, my mother is strong but stretched thin from years of people pulling apart and pulling away. She is the bond that ensures we’re all in the same place—geographically, at least—on major holidays, graduation days, birthdays, as often as is possible—though less and less over the years. But I know that without her, this won’t happen at all. I’ve never been close to my siblings. My hands weren’t made for reaching out, gathering people together.

I lie awake nights worrying for no particular reason that my mother is dead. She’s not sick from any one thing, but she’s not well either, and I don’t believe she takes care of herself, and anyway, she doesn’t have the money to properly take care of herself—nor do I, which is certainly my one great failure as a daughter. The thought that my mother could stop being alive from one moment to the next, that—one unspecified day or night—she will stop being alive from one moment to the next, fills me with empty in a way I cannot express. All the words I have aren’t big enough, and still, they catch in my throat, lodging themselves in the hollow of my chest. For I will have lost my mother. I will have lost the body that was once my own. The body that was once my home. I will have lost her safe hands and her tired smile. Her rich voice and her knowing eyes. I will have lost the only person who texts me just to make sure I made it home.

When my mother’s mother was dying, I got a taste of that unspeakable empty. My grandmother was my best friend. I sat in her hospital room with the rest of my family. I bought her a Christmas card and wrote a message that I would later have to read aloud to her because she couldn’t read it herself. I had underlined all the important words—three or four underlines for very important words—as we always did in the cards we gave to each other, just the way she had taught me. I heard her cry that she wanted to go home. I saw her struggle under the weight of the machine that apparently helped her to breathe. I watched my mother carefully dip the tiny pink hydration sucker into a styrofoam cup of water and then lovingly take it to her mother’s mouth, over and over again, tirelessly, because she was thirsty and couldn’t drink. I marveled at how much the sucker resembled a child’s candy—even in name—and how quickly, it seems, we come full circle if we live long enough, how we all eventually reverse roles.

I was late to my birth. A joke made throughout my childhood. But it always made sense to me: I simply wanted to stay with my mother a little while longer. Maybe I understood even then that, in birth, I would begin the slow, irreversible process of losing her. Doubtless she lost me in many ways, as I was growing up—ways I’ll never understand unless I myself become a mother. The final loss, however, will be mine. She will do the last pulling away, and I will always carry the loss. One day I will know a life without her. I will do all the practical things that a good daughter does, but what I will want to do is crawl back inside my mother’s dead womb and bury myself within her. I will want to make her my home again, filling her body once more with my life, reawakening her cold, tired limbs with my own.

Perhaps I am selfish. I don’t want to strap her in, as I did recently on a car trip, twisting around from the driver’s seat, when her arthritis played tricks with the buckle and the snap. I’m not strong enough to feed her or clean her or remind her who I am or who she was to me. I only want to step out of my skin and wrap her in it—lovingly, carefully—like a cloak. I want to cut off my right hand and give it to her. Cut off my left. Cut off all my black hair and crown her with it. I will gather her twisted fingers and her swollen leg. I will claim them as my own, if it means we can go on walking together, a little while longer.

They’ll find my bare body in the bathtub. I’m not prepared for anyone to rummage through my things. Not ready for them to look at journals of my deepest secrets. My half-written stories. Stories I’d only share under a pen name.

I’m not ready to be found dead, naked. I haven’t lost the weight I gained a year ago. Since I stopped vaping nicotine—only started because of sexual harassment by the contractor remodeling my bathroom, reminded me of the trauma I experienced as a young child and teenager. I open the shower curtain, shivering.

Over three years ago, someone hit my car. The ambulance took me to the hospital with a concussion. My memory isn’t as perfect as in the past since then.

Mayo Clinic says, “Alzheimer’s is a progressive disorder that causes brain cells to waste away (degenerate) and die.”

I never wanted to lose my mind. My body had seemed expendable, but not my logic, reasoning, ability to remember. “An early sign of the disease is usually difficulty recalling recent events or conversations.” I could never cut myself on purpose. The coppery stench and the sight of blood nauseate me. I’m allergic to copper.

Why are there no windows here? So I could see the morning sun’s light streaming in one last time? The last things I’ll see are these strawberry-pink walls, the porcelain toilet, floor-to-ceiling mirrored-cabinet by the door. No counter. No sink. More than three years, and I haven’t yet trusted men to come in to install them. The bathroom could use some cleaning, organizing. The whole apartment could.

Why am I concerned with what anyone will think, find? Are these the typical thoughts, regrets of the dying?

In my youth, I’d taken pills twice—attempting to kill myself. The second time, I left a note. I wanted them to know it wasn’t an accidental overdose. I made sure they were aware of my choice of ending it all. Now, I want to shout, “Stop bleeding! This shouldn’t be my end!” Do I value life more now that I have lived?

Still, why do I care what people think once I’m gone, and how they will discover me? It makes sense I wouldn’t want this burden on my son—he’d be devastated—but anyone else? Who cares?

This could be a puzzle. Unsolvable. “Why did she do it?” They’d ask. “Wasn’t she happy?” I love puzzles. They’re functional exercises for the brain. My father brought home a puzzle-filled magazine every week. I’ve been solving them since childhood. Later, I learned that blueberries and puzzles are the best ways to try to prevent Alzheimer’s.

The contractor asked me to hold the two-by-four in place. He grabbed me. I jumped away. He laughed. My memory was still perfect. As a child, I had been molested.

My older son—who often comes across as an all-knowing sage, although not always accurate—he’d probably squint at my teenage son and proclaim, “This was a long time coming. She had a terrible life. For so long. That kind of stuff messes with you, and one day, you can’t shut your eyes anymore. Plus, she never got over losing our sister.”

No, I’m not thinking of what my eldest would say, but maybe in my subconscious, those words are present, embedded. Sometimes, we’re not aware of these thoughts at the moment. Only that nagging feeling: This is wrong. They can’t find me like this!

“Risk factors: Genetics, head injuries, depression, hypertension.”

Throughout the years, Mom, my sister, and I had struggled with our fair share of depression. Not without cause. Anyone in our place probably would have. My sister and I grew up with an alcoholic father—physical abuse was one of his ways to keep us down.

When the kids were small, I worked as a caretaker, part-time. The lady had dementia. She needed help getting out of bed, walking to the bathroom, taking pills. I spoon-fed her like a baby. Answered her repeating questions—a recording on a loop—as if she’d just asked for the first time. “Alzheimer’s is the cause of 60-70% of cases of dementia,” according to Wikipedia. She wanted to go home every day, leaving her house, wandering the streets, thinking her daughter was her niece.

The blade’s sharp, brand-new, but in a hurry, without caution, I ran it up my left calf. Then the right. A small consolation to think that at least I’m not standing here half-shaven on one leg, pressing a wad of toilet paper on the wound. At least two inches long, running down in the back toward my heel, 3-5 millimeters wide.

My teenage son will find me upon awakening. A harrowing situation that will stamp him with a kind of sorrow he’ll never forget. Will he ever be okay? My sons will think I committed suicide! Everyone will believe I committed suicide! What a stupid mistake! They won’t know I only carved myself shaving.

Piercing pain. Crimson colors the bottom of the white tub, the side. Why won’t it stop? How much blood can one lose without fainting? Is this the end? Movies depict how some broken souls slice near their ankles, not the usual place, the wrists. At sixteen, I was raped. At nineteen, I was raped. I’ll bleed to death.

The contractor said, “Check, the toilet’s leaking.” He grabbed me again. I ran. He chased me.

“As the disease advances, symptoms can include problems with language, disorientation, mood swings, loss of motivation, not managing self-care, and behavioral issues.”

I’ve been watching for symptoms when I visit Mom; when calling her to talk—myself, too, since the accident. She’s over sixty-five, the usual time of onset. Even if I diagnose her and blame the moodiness and her harsh treatment on this neurological disease, what else could I do? How could I help her? She lives thousands of miles away, and here I stand in a pool of blood, naked.

I once had a skin-tag on my thigh. With the dimensions of a small lentil, it was hardly a life-changing deformity. It was the kind of thing I’d just rub occasionally, unconsciously. The kind of thing that made me feel self-conscious about wearing a bathing suit, my imagination making a mountain out of a molehill.

The day I first tied a piece of string around it was the day my friend died.

“Please tell me you’re joking,” my sister implored me when I told her. “Just get the doctor to do it. You can’t go around amputating parts of your body!”

I had received a phone call when I was halfway through getting dressed one morning. There had been an accident. There was nothing anyone could have done. They were so sorry.

I sat on my bed in my t-shirt, staring at the skin-tag on my leg. Nobody tells you how to react to news like that. There are no lessons about it in school. Should I be crying? Should I be raging? Whilst still trying to decide, I selected a piece of white cotton from my sewing kit, and slipped a loop of it over the skin-tag. It pinched painfully as it tightened, and I smiled.

The ache spread across my leg as I put my trousers on and went to work. The scene of the accident was undisturbed, shards of glass and twisted metal still lying where the aircraft and its pilot had hit the ground. Nobody tells you how to look at things like that. Or explains how numbness and pain can be the same thing. When I got home I re-tightened the cotton and watched as the blood supply cut off.

I phoned my sister again.

“It’s going well, actually. It’s shrunk quite a bit, but doesn’t seem to be getting infected.”

“You need help.”

Management called our engineering team together a few days later, to discuss what had happened. It had probably been a horrific twist of fate, but it was one that would be investigated fully. We would all be expected to take part in interviews, and submit our maintenance records and paperwork for examination. If one of us had screwed up, then they would find out. But we had their sympathies, apparently.

I stood side by side with my colleagues, feeling the words pelt me like little darts as I reached through the torn pocket of my overalls and tugged gently on the ends of the piece of thread. The skin-tag had shriveled up completely now, and re-tightening the cotton had become a trickier task than I had anticipated.

“If it’s infected, you should really go and see the doctor.”

I was starting to wish I hadn't told my sister about my do-it-yourself amputation project. She seemed to be far more emotionally invested in it than I was. While she expressed growing concern, I just regarded it with indifference; an increasingly painful inconvenience that proved I could still feel. Something that marked the passage of time in a world that had, in many other ways, stopped.

On the day of the funeral I couldn't bring myself to renew the cotton. It was clamped so tightly around the bottom of the tag that I couldn’t actually get it undone. I shrugged, and eased my trousers up to hide it.

I met the rest of my colleagues afterwards at the wake, barely recognising some of my fellow mechanics in their dark suits and ties. I felt a familiar bite of pain as I sat, and I wondered what the rest of them were concealing underneath their starched shirts and lint-free jackets. Were they cutting away parts of themselves, too?

We drank a lot. Too much. As if trying to prove that it’s actually possible to drown your sorrows. The weight that had been building in my chest became unbearable by midnight, and I headed for the hotel’s washroom with mumbled excuses before a scream broke free. I could see little to be gained by breaking down in front of a roomful of people who were all, on the surface at least, whole.

I slammed into the cubicle door, weaved my way around it, and managed to lock it behind me. Without thinking, I unbuttoned my trousers and wrenched them down as I sat, with none of the care I had taken for the past two weeks.

The long ends of the cotton caught in the zip.

There was a sharp, shooting pain as the skin-tag tore off completely.

I swore loudly in shock. The wound was small, fairly clean, and surprisingly neat. A strange sense of satisfaction settled over me, tinged with an odd feeling of loss.

I detached the string still hanging from my zip, and held it up to the light to see what was left of my skin-tag. The urge to giggle was strong, and seemed deeply inappropriate. Tears came to my eyes as I fought to conceal my laughter from the neighbouring cubicles. They would never understand how I came to be sitting here, alone, on a toilet, with feet rubbed raw by ill-fitting heels, a headache from too much wine, a drop of blood hovering on my thigh, and a piece of cotton held high with a dead piece of myself still caught in it. The tears spilled over.

Surely this must be my lowest point.

I bowed my head to watch as tears landed on my thighs with a silent splash, and used my thumb to push one of them across the bloody gap where my skin-tag had been. My leg was fine, but my heart hurt in indescribable ways. A savage feeling of emptiness. Grief for a friend torn away, and a wound that would never fully heal.

And now, occasionally, I catch a glimpse of the small, white scar on my leg—all that remains of my DIY amputation project. And I remember the day my friend died.