What did I write when Mom was dying? I want to read it again.

At Bethel Ridge by 8:30 this morning. She is in the bed by the window, very small, with the oxygen hissing. Her hands are cold and her feet are warm, which Judy says is the wrong way round.

She woke about eleven and looked at me for a while and said, "Margaret. You have your coat on. Are you coming or going?" I said I was staying. She said, "Well, take it off, then."

That is the most she said all day.

I am at Walt and Nancy's, in the room with the deer head. Judy has the night.

Third day. She has not woken since yesterday afternoon. The breathing stops and starts; I have caught myself holding mine until hers comes back.

Walt sat with her this morning and read her the farm report out of the paper, milk prices and all, as he used to do for Dad. Pastor Lindquist came at two, and we sang, the four of us, without a book: Judy on the melody, Walt a third below as always, I somewhere between. "Children of the Heavenly Father," every verse, the last in Norwegian as far as any of us could get.

I do not know what I believe happens. I know that her face eased when we sang.

Tasha, the aide on evenings, came in after her shift was over and braided Mom's hair, because Mom would not like to be seen with it down.

Mom died this morning at twenty minutes to seven. February 9, 2014. She was eighty-seven.

Judy and I were both there. Judy had the night, and telephoned Walt's a little after four because the breathing had changed, and Walt and I drove over on empty streets before the heater was warm. At half past six he went down the hall for coffee. He was gone ten minutes, and those were the ten minutes. I will not let him say another word about that.

There was nothing to see, in the way there is nothing to see when a clock stops. The breaths got further apart. Judy had two fingers on her wrist and was watching the second hand on the wall clock, as she has done for forty years for strangers. I had Mom's other hand. A breath, and then a long time, and I thought, that was it; and then one more; and then it was. Judy said the time out loud. Then she put her forehead down on the blanket, and for a while she was not a nurse.

The window was just going gray over the bluffs. There was a snowplow somewhere.

What I did afterward, in order, because I do not know what else to put down. Her glasses were on the bedside table, and I put them in my pocket; they are in my pocket now. I telephoned R., who answered on the first ring and said, "I'm coming," and is on the road. I telephoned Ellen, then David, then Kate, oldest first, as on a Sunday, and it is a Sunday. Kate cried. David asked what he should do, and I said nothing yet, come Thursday. Ellen asked whether I had eaten.

Carla, the hospice nurse, came and was quiet and kind and wrote things down. Two men came from the funeral home at nine, in dark overcoats, and one of them called her Mrs. Haugen as if she could hear, which I liked. Walt signed.

She was born a Tollefson on a farm outside Westby in 1926, the fourth of six, and outlived them all. She married Dad in 1948 and went to the Haugen farm at Coon Valley, and at that kitchen table she taught me to read before I went to school, out of the newspaper. She buried Dad in 1998.

I have her glasses and I do not know what one does with them.

Nancy has made eggs. I am going to eat them.

Two days of arrangements. The funeral is Friday at eleven at Our Saviour's, where she was a member for sixty-five years and where R. and I were married. Burial at Coon Prairie beside Dad afterward. Walt asked whether the ground would allow it. The sexton says they have a way of thawing it. Friday is Valentine's Day. Nobody had noticed until the florist said so.

Judy wrote the obituary and I was given the dates to correct, being the one who does such things. I checked every one against the papers in her box and found that Mom had been giving her own wedding anniversary wrong by a day for at least thirty years. I put in the right one. Judy thinks I should have left it.

She never wrote any of it down. She told us, over the years, a piece at a time, and it turns out Judy and I remember the same things: this church, "Children of the Heavenly Father," beside Dad, and no fuss, by which she meant a full church and a ham lunch. The pallbearers are to be grandchildren, six of them, the girls included. David flies in tomorrow night and Kate on Thursday.

We buried Mom today.

About 140 people at Our Saviour's, which for a woman of eighty-seven, on a Friday in February, at four below zero, is a compliment she would have noted. What is left of the Ladies Aid sat together in the fourth pew on the left, where they always did. Vi came from Bethel Ridge in the van with two aides.

Judy read the lesson. I had been asked, and I had said I could not, which is the first time I have said that about reading aloud since the first grade. I sat and looked at the exit sign on the back wall, a trick I teach children for the spelling bee.

Pastor Lindquist spoke about her for eight minutes and got her right: that she fed anyone who came to the door and then told them what they were doing wrong. People laughed, the kind of laugh you get in a church. We sang "Children of the Heavenly Father," and at the second verse Walt took out his handkerchief.

Hannah is five and sat between Ellen and me. During the prayers she leaned over and whispered, "Is Great-Grandma in the box, or is it just her outside?" I said we would talk about it in the car.

The six grandchildren carried her: our three, Walt's two boys and Judy's daughter. Kate is five foot three and took a front corner. David had flown in Wednesday night and left Julia and the baby in Denver. From behind, in the dark coat, he looked very much like Dad.

Then the drive to Coon Prairie, twenty-five cars with their lights on, down through Coon Valley past the farm. The new people have painted the barn. The cemetery was drifted and bright, with a green carpet laid over the snow and a tent, and the wind came straight across the ridge. It was short. It had to be. Hannah asked whether Great-Grandma would be cold, and Ellen knelt down in the snow in her good coat and answered her, better than I could have. Dad's stone has had Mom's name on it since 1998, with the one date. Now they will cut the other.

Lunch in the church basement: ham on buns, potato salad, three kinds of bars, my lefse, egg coffee, the smell of every funeral I have ever been to. People told me things about her I had not known. She drove the bookmobile route one winter, as a substitute, in 1961. Nobody ever told me that.

R. drove us back to Walt's. In the driveway he turned off the engine and we sat. He said, "She was hard on you and she was proud of you. Both." Then he came round and got my door.