I don?t think there has been a time in my life when I have felt more close to my mother. Am I a ?momma?s boy?? Hardly.

My mother has been no background ornamentation; she?s demanding, and for most of my life I struggled against her, at one point spurning and blaming her for my own difficulties. She earned most of the crap I dished out.

That, however, was then, and this is now. One might say I?ve got my own karma coming, especially with my own kids. What goes around comes around generationally (even if you don?t believe in karma!). I understand these kinds of cycles. Still, I?m at the end of such things with my mother.

She is dying.

Some people lose a parent suddenly. That?s what happened with my wife; both her mother and father died suddenly, and then she and her brother, and other family members, had to deal with the results of such a sudden and unexpected departure.

All that happened before I met her. Some people, by contrast, get to walk through the dying process with a loved-one in a somewhat longer good-bye. That is what I am currently doing with my mother.

She lives just outside of Portland, Oregon, nestled among the big trees she has always loved. It?s the good time of year to be in that part of Oregon, because the sun shines and the colours are bright. I phone her, and we talk. I mark the changes in her voice tones. In that way I walk beside her.

I can see all the classic and well-established stages of the dying process going on with her. I know the psychology of this stuff. I took a great class in undergrad on death and dying from a professor who?d had a heart attack and come to face his own mortality.

He used to say it wasn?t until he faced dying that he learned how to really live. Anyway, we studied Elizabeth Kubler-Ross?s stages of dying. She used to think they occurred for people in sequence, and now it?s believed they are best understood as kinds of processes dying people go through, often experiencing them shifting in and out of sequence, being revisited or even taking place rather mixed together.

My mother is showing them all: denial, bargaining, anger, and acceptance.

When I was in the ministry I worked with those who were dying and those who had lost a person through death. I conducted funerals. It?s not the same as living through the grief firsthand.

One of my friends wrote to me and said that she was praying for both my mother and myself. She hoped my mother lasted long enough for me to go to her and to hold her in my arms. You know, I can be a man?s man; I can sip whiskey and smoke cigars with my colleagues at conferences and such. I can spit and scratch myself in public.

I can watch war movies and sporting events. I like to yell at the screen when someone scores. I?ve been known to cuss out a few people driving in traffic. So, what do I think of doing when I see my mother? For some reason, I want to brush her hair.

I can imagine doing that with tenderness, love in each stroke ? maybe tears running down my cheeks.

My mother is a Christian, and she knows she is going to be with her own mother and her youngest son, who are both already with Jesus in heaven. My wife says right now it?s like she?s backing up with all she?s gone through in front of her, but that soon she will turn to face what lies ahead, and when she does that, she?ll start to see beyond the dying to the other side.

I believe that. I think that will happen, but right now she?s scared. She fears the transition.

My mother has lung cancer. This last weekend they took two litres of fluid from her lungs, and she learned what it felt like not to be able to breathe. She is afraid of drowning in her own fluid. When she tells me about that, she cries.

I want to hold my mother and tell her it?s going to be okay. That ornery, wilful, impulsive, and controlling person is now fragile, vulnerable, and frightened.

All I can think of is comforting her. Maybe this is the most important part of our relationship.