Juana arrived at the hospital in tears but didn’t speak much. She stood by the window, holding a teddy bear she’d brought. Smoggy shafts of sunset filled the room and stained the linoleum floors like thin tomato soup. Cold air came through the cracked-open window and tapped our skin like fingers. There was a playground across the street. We could hear the squeal of rusty swings and the shrill voices of children calling fouls. There was a sweet, wrong smell coming from the cold breeze—like maple syrup. The papers said something about a factory disaster down in Jersey.

Tom pulled out his BlackBerry and searched for information about Lucy’s condition. He wanted to know what had happened to her. Getting old and dying wasn’t enough for the search field. He couldn’t find specifics.

I stood by Lucy’s bed and held her hand. A breathing machine went clack, clack, clack as it brought the air into her body, its plastic tube expanding and collapsing like an accordion.

I went to the bathroom and sat in the handicapped stall for nearly twenty minutes, just to be alone.

“Upset?” my mother asked when I got back. She was checking my eyes for signs of crying. I could count the number of times I’d done this in front of her. No matter what comfort she’d offered, there was always a desire lurking underneath her words, a hope that if I’d been crying, I would find the strength to stop.

“No,” I said. “I wish I had been.”

She hugged me then, with force. “Well, that’s something I get,” she said. “I’ve felt a lot of things in my life, and I’ve barely cried about any of them.”

It was a bright day, a good death. That’s what people say about a death like hers. She was old. It didn’t hurt. I watched a nurse thread a morphine tube into the blue vein beneath her puffy skin. This marked the end of life support, the beginning of something called comfort care.

The smell of her room had two layers: soap and urine. Her face was bloated with fluids that came from her organs shutting down. Her chin swelled against the plastic collar of her breathing tube. The tube was no longer connected to anything on the other end. We tracked the beeping of her heart on a mint-green machine. Her deep breaths rattled and then stopped completely. I saw her chest deflate and then I turned away.

My mother unplugged the heart monitor before we heard the flatline. I kissed my grandmother’s forehead and smoothed back her matted white hair. Juana let out a startled cry—“Ay!”—and started sobbing.

The beeping was gone. The clacking of the breathing tube was gone. Juana’s weeping was the only sound in the room.

Gone was the word my mother used about her sister whenever I asked, which made it sound like Matilda was the one who’d chosen to leave. Or else she used the word “estranged,” which seemed apt: made strange to her own family. I pictured her living alone in the middle of an empty field, catching lightning with her fingertips, her body gone electric like the human maps she’d studied.