PART 3 — CLOSER THAN YOU THINK
I sat very still for a long moment. Then I asked Mr. Becker to bring her in.
The door opened and there was Diane. The night nurse who had brought my mother peppermints for eight months. Who had hugged me at the funeral and cried harder than anyone. She stood in the doorway with her hands folded, afraid to come closer.
My mother had given her up in 1963, seventeen years old and with no choice anyone left her. She searched for forty years and found Diane in 2015. And when she learned she was dying, she did the only thing her heart could manage. She hired her own lost daughter as her nurse, so she could be cared for by both of her girls at the end without either of us knowing.
My mother did not leave half of everything to a stranger. She left it to the sister she had been quietly giving back to me, one evening visit at a time, for eight months.
Diane told me she had begged our mother to keep the secret, afraid I would feel she had stolen my last months. I crossed the room and put my arms around her before she could finish the sentence.
We talked until the lawyers office closed and then we kept talking in the parking lot. She had Moms hands. The same way of tilting her head when she listened. Sixty years I had been an only child, and I had a sister all along.
We split the estate exactly the way Mom wanted, down the middle. But the thing my mother really left us was each other. She spent her whole life grieving one daughter and raising the other, and in the end she found a way to put us in the same room, hold both our hands, and let go knowing we would never be alone again.