My mom died ten years ago today. Before she died, I had heard people say that someone had a “good death,” but the phrase always sounded hollow. Her death taught me what that phrase really means.

This is what you need to know about my mother for this story to make any sense: While the words “kinder and gentler” were kind of ruined by George Bush I, they epitomize who she was. She was kinder and gentler than anyone you know. She was also a hobby printer and long-time member of the American Amateur Press Association (AAPA), a one-time owner of a used bookstore, and the manager of the bookstore at Ursuline College. Yeah, we were kind of a bookish family.

She was diagnosed with lung cancer on September 12, 2001, (remember that day? I have some vague memory of some important happening the day before.) The cancer had already metastasized to her brain. She was gone six months later. (I feel compelled to add that no, she didn’t smoke. But she grew up near the steel mills of Youngstown and married a man who smoked back in the day when people still smoked indoors at the dinner table with their kids around.)

My mom and I spent a lot of time together before she died. Heck, we always spent a lot of time together and talked frequently. Towards the end, we said that there was nothing left unsaid between us but that we were never at a loss for words.

She got weaker and weaker as the cancer decimated her body.  The last few days of her life, she stopped eating and was in what the Tibetan Book of the Dead calls the “Bardo”–the place between life and death. It was as though she had already entered that last peaceful sleep. My siblings and I were privately wonder when “It” would happen.

My mom had a birthday calendar (which I have now inherited) that not only had anniversaries and birthdays of friends and family but things like the date Thomas Merton entered the monastery and Gerard Manley Hopkins’ birthday (who wasn’t actually a family friend). Things happened to her on significant dates. We felt sure that she would die on a significant date.

She died at Little Sisters of the Poor, where she spent the last six weeks of her life. She had worked there part-time in a post-retirement job, and I think to her it felt gentler and less permanent than going to hospice. The night she died, the nuns there (who are saints on earth, every last one of them–don’t let anyone tell you different) said that March 8 was a very special day because it is the Feast of St. John of God. He’s the patron of hospitals and their order holds him very dear. So that seemed nice.

When my mother did die, it was as peaceful and gentle as her nature. One of the nuns had said it would be “like a candle going out,” and it was. All of her children and almost all of her sons and daughters-in-law were there. (My husband wasn’t there yet.) We sang songs to her (some that she had written). There was a moment when we had stopped singing, and one of my sisters mentioned that we had left purses, etc. sitting out in the common room down the hall. Why this would matter in a nursing home at 7:45 on a Friday night, I don’t know, but I said I’d go check on our stuff. About 20 seconds later, my sister-in-law came running down the hall and said, “She’s gone.”

I went back in and one of my sisters said, “She opened her eyes for a second, and then she was gone.” They had rung for the nurse on duty, who came in, checked her pulse and said, “She’s not dead.”

That’s when my husband walked in. She waited until I had someone to hold onto, and then she went, just as peacefully as a candle going out. A friend said later that she must have sent me out of the room because I was her baby. Maybe I’ve always been marked as different.

A few weeks later, I met my sisters at my mother’s apartment to start going through her things. I was the first one, and I wandered around her belongings wondering where she had gone. There was a small, slightly worn copy of Lives of the Saints sitting on top of one of the bookcases. I’m not sure why or how it got there. Nobody had been in her apartment for a while–she hadn’t lived there for nearly two months. But I picked it up and turned to March 8, which was indeed the feast of St. John of God, patron saint of printers. And booksellers.

After the chills left my spine, the world seemed much clearer and some of the pain from her death lifted. Ten years on, I still miss her, but I’m at peace with the loss. May we all have such a good death.