By 2018 she needed an oxygen tank just to walk into town, and getting to her specialist appointments forty minutes away usually meant relying on volunteer drivers from church, since Dad was often out working and I was buried in the store. This selfie is from that period -- a bad photo, dim and out of focus, taken on a rainy morning to send to me and never actually sent. I only found it on her phone after she passed. Mom died at home in November of 2019, in the same bedroom she and Dad had shared since 1961. I think the hardest part of her last years wasn't the illness itself but the quiet -- my sister had been gone for decades by then with no way to reach her, and between the store and my own kids, I couldn't be there as often as I should have been. She never complained about it, which somehow made it worse.