It was a thirty-year battle with Crohn's Disease that took my mom's life. In and out of hospitals since before I can remember, she lost most of her small intestine and finally a kidney that had been filling with stones for years. After the kidney, she decided no more. No more operations. No more utter lack of control over her life. She was determined to have the final say. And she was tired. Just tired.

Right after Jayanthi came home, my mom called to say her doctor had "asked hospice to come in." Remembering the way she then said, "We've had a lot of great times together, haven't we?" still brings tears.

Jaya had to gain weight before we could drive to Massachusetts where my mom lived, and she did so with gusto. She weighed a hefty half-dozen pounds by the time we set out east. We'd planned to stop halfway, but just before we left my sister Jen called, saying "Mom's barely hanging on. She keeps asking, 'Where's the baby? When's the baby coming?' " So we drove straight through.

Although Jen had cautioned me to expect the worst, I had no armor against seeing our mom so tiny and helpless. Through the morphine and pain, she summoned wide eyes and a faint smile to greet us, using every ounce of her strength to reach for the baby, whom she held with our support. Jayanthi was as calm as I've only elsewhere seen her in sleep. Mom was in the hospital a day later, her pain too great even for home hospice.

We spent the next morning alone together--me, mom, and that familiar beep of a fucking i.v. in her arm. Only one of us could talk, and after I'd exhausted all awkward references to the weather, after I'd told her we loved her and it was okay to let go, I said, "I'm just going to sit here with you, mom. I'm holding your hand and I'm just going to be here with you, okay?"

In mere minutes, I had run away without even noticing. Sure, I still held her hand. But in my mind I was wondering how Jaya and Swa were doing; how my dad was holding up; I was even planning lunch. Any moment could be my last with this woman who had given me everything, and I wanted to be anywhere but in that room with her, with the labored gasps that had stolen her breath, with the finality of death descending without regard for all that she'd been, all that she would've been to her grandchildren, and all that she'd already suffered, struggled against, and lived through.

I came back to that room the second I noticed I'd wandered. I was raw with grief. I would've given anything to end her suffering one way or the other, but there was nothing I could do. She'd let go when her body let her. So I sat. No longer adjusting the situation at all, no running or wallowing, I just sat holding her hand, finally accepting the utter helplessness of us both. And in that moment, nothing changed: my mom was still dying and the pain I felt was still almost unbearable. But even that was o.k. now, because I no longer ran from it.

Maybe it's just human nature to give weight to these moments -- but the mind that runs from death is the same mind that runs from discarded Popsicle wrappers. To put it simply, moment by moment we're either avoiding life or we're not.

When she was still a layperson, Theravadin nun Ajahn Thanasanti was attacked by a Himalayan black bear while hiking in Nepal. These days the long scars covering her shaved head tell you everything but this: when her head was in its mouth, she let go, completely, into just that moment. If it's my time, she thought, it's my time. Being nowhere but there meant no future to fear, no past to regret. No coulds or shoulds. And the moment she gave up, the bear inexplicably released her and ran away.

People love this story and never tire of hearing her tell it or telling it themselves. "And she realized that she literally owed her life to her meditation practice, and that she could trust it --and the universe--so much that she became a nun."

The last time I saw someone ask her about it, she said, "Y' know, people like the bear story because it's big and dramatic. But letting go with your head in a bear's mouth is easy. It's much harder to let go with a mosquito biting you, because with a mosquito we still think we can win."