[-1:14.00]how sorry she was that she wasn't having a better day.
[-1:15.00]"I'm not always like this," she said.
[-1:16.00]Mostly she just watched Laurie.
[-1:17.00]12  We were flying back to the US that night and I had hated telling her,
[-1:18.00]remembering how she had always cried when I left.
[-1:19.00]But in the end, I was the one who cried.
[-1:20.00]she had said she was ready to die.
[-1:21.00]But as I leaned over to stroke her forehead,
[-1:22.00]what she said was, "I wish I had your hair"
[-1:23.00]and "I wish I was well."
[-1:24.00]13  On the plane flying home, with Laurie in my arms,
[-1:25.00]I thought about mothers and daughters,
[-1:26.00]and the four generations of the family that I know most intimately.
[-1:27.00]Every one of those mothers loves
[-1:28.00]and needs her daughter more than her daughter
[-1:29.00]will ever love or need her mother.
[-1:30.00]We mothers are, each of us,
[-1:31.00]the only person on earth
[-1:32.00]who has quite such an all-consuming interest in our child.
[-1:33.00]14  Sometimes I kiss and hold Laurie so much she starts crying
[-1:34.00]— which is, in effect,
[-1:35.00]what my grandmother was doing to my mother, all her life.
[-1:36.00]And what makes my mother sad right now,I think,
[-1:37.00]is not simply that her mother will die in a day or two,
[-1:38.00]but that, once her mother dies,
[-1:39.00]there will never again be someone to love her in quite such a complete,
[-1:40.00]unrestrained way.
[-1:41.00]She will only be a mother, then, not a daughter anymore.
[-1:42.00]15  Laurie and I have stopped over for a night to be with my mother.
[-1:43.00]Tomorrow my mother will fly back to be with my grandmother.
[-1:44.00]But tonight she is feeding me,
[-1:45.00]as she always does when I come,
[-1:46.00]and I am eating more than I do anywhere else.
[-1:47.00]I admire the wedding dishes (once my grandmother's)
[-1:48.00]that my mother has set on the table.
[-1:49.00]She says (the way Grandma used to say to her),
[-1:50.00]"Some day they will be yours."

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