I'm Major Jackson and this is the slowdown.

And this is the slowdown. while my mother lay in the hospital on her last waking night on earth.

I ran a slide carousel of images in my mind's eye of my favorite moments with her.

Click, laughing and dancing to Shaka Khan in the living room.

Click, watching her pushing pins into a wall-sized map of streets where she dispatched telephone line workers,

bring a kid to work day.

Click, her squatting down to console my brother doing some crying jag.

Click, crushing me and my stepfather at Games of Scrabble,

but looking on coyly like little old me.

She was a tender person who loved life and all things family.

But of course, she had her complexities and made decisions that caused harm.

I will not catalog them here, as I have written quite a bit in my early books about her challenges with addiction.

That night in the hospital, when the morphine wore off, she thrashed her body and her eyes,

pleadingly looked around for an answer

as to what was happening to her.

My worry and sadness at watching her die

yielded to something more powerful, a consequential

understanding and grand love of all that she was, all of her, her incredible

strength, her resilience of suffering years of domestic abuse, her

fierce dedication, and yes, her less than graceful moments.

She was making the journey, and we were witnesses.

It was startling then, when after everyone left, just me and her, I leaned over to say,

...