Chiyo’s mother had never come to terms with the fact that her life was ending. She died in her room with several people in plain sight. No one was with her at the moment of death.

The doctor was recalled before he had a chance to start up his car. He filled in the essential paperwork, notified the funeral home and told Chiyo a hearse would arrive within the hour. Chiyo sat with her mother’s body, but after several minutes, the caregivers respectfully sent her from the room so that the body could be cleaned, prepared, dressed in clothes Chiyo had chosen from the closet and bureau.

When Chiyo went back to the room—these were the last moments she would ever have with her mother—the first thing she saw was a long strip of brown cotton bandage, two inches wide, looped under her mother’s chin and tied in a clumsy knot above her ear, on one side of her head.

This was the image locked in the memory vault. The one Chiyo could not banish.

Her mother’s face was peaceful. Her life was over, her body still warm. But the oversized knot of brown bandage at the side of her head was incongruous, discordant. Chiyo felt herself slipping sideways, the room unnaturally askew. Inhale, she told herself. Exhale. Call upon your training. Stay upright. You know how to focus. Go deep. Still the mind.

Why had her mother’s jaw been tied? Would it have fallen open in death? Did her dentures not fit—for she did have dentures. Was there thought to be impropriety if a dead person had an open mouth? Chiyo didn’t know. Nor did she know if she’d have been more upset if her mother’s jaw was slack and drooping.

All she knew was that this was her last vision of her mother. The vision had nothing to do with love, which was what Chiyo had been expecting to feel. There was no room for love because it had been squeezed out by sadness, haste, the grim image now etched in her mind. The hearse drove up to the bungalow, and two quiet-spoken, efficient young people—a man and a woman in their twenties—arrived with a stretcher and wheeled her mother away in a body bag.

Sometimes this last vision swept in unexpectedly and lodged behind Chiyo’s eyes: the brown-coloured bandage holding up her mother’s chin, forcing her mouth closed for the first and last time. Not the mother she had known. The image refused to give way to something kinder.

She should have untied the knot and pitched the bandage into the garbage. But she did not. The caregivers were competent and had been through this procedure many times. Chiyo had yielded to them because they were supposed to know what they were doing. She should have spoken out.

What she wanted now was a reminder of her mother’s beauty. Her mother was attractive in her younger years and remained so as she aged. There were photos in an album, not from her mother’s childhood in the camp in British Columbia but taken during her thirties, forties. Chiyo decided she would find a good photograph and grace it with a frame.