EMILY PRATT SLATIN

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She/Her/Hers Lesbian

Former Career Fire and EMS Lieutenant-Specialist, Writer, and Master Photographer.

Mom—My First Best Friend Forever

October 23, 2025—Stamford, New York (Mom's House)

Mom died last Friday—under a Virgo moon. Thin, quiet, almost polite about it. The kind of moon that minds its business and expects you to do the same. I remember looking up and thinking how small it was, how restrained. She would've liked that. No drama, no spectacle. Just an exit wrapped neatly in order.

The doctors called and told me to come quickly, so I did. No hesitation—just that familiar, hardwired instinct to move. Years of running toward someone else's disaster had trained it into me. But this time there were no sirens, no pulse checks, no saving to be done. Just me, driving through the low hum of late-afternoon traffic in Upstate New York, watching the distance stretch itself thin. I didn't think about what I'd say. You stop rehearsing those things after a while. Someone says, "Come now," and you just go. Because when it's your mother, that's all the instruction you need.

The hardest part of going home for a dying parent isn't the house—it's the drive. Every road carries a memory you didn't consent to revisit. I kept passing the places she and I used to roam, each one hitting like a quiet ambush. I thought about those afternoons she'd pick me up from school. I always hoped it would be her, not dad. Mom never scolded me for dressing too "girly." She'd just smile, like she saw something in me that made sense. Something my father refused to see.

When I finally saw her, her voice was thin but sharp with purpose. Months of fading had distilled her into something pure—just truth and fatigue. Every word she spoke carried the ache of someone who'd waited too long to be heard. There was a tremor in it, that soft plea for acknowledgment. I listened. I always do. It's been my curse and my calling—to catch the things left unsaid, the pauses heavy with everything that hurts too much to name.

There's a cruel kind of stillness when your mother is moved to a private room. The air changes. Visiting hours don't matter anymore. Words grow slow, like they know they're running out. It's the kind of silence that strips ceremony of meaning, where goodbyes stop sounding like sentences and start sounding like breaths. You can feel the story ending before the final page turns—and you realize what's left is yours to carry, whether you're ready or not.

It smelled like hospital sanitizer—the same sharp sting I came to know during my years as a Paramedic. Some scents never leave; they just linger long enough for you to walk back into them.

She said her life had been ordinary until the day I was born. That when I came along, the doctors told her I was a girl, but I was different. She didn't understand at first, not until they pointed out the parts that didn't match the binary expectations of society. She told me she raised me as a girl because that's what felt right to her, despite my fathers objections. She said she was proud of me for becoming the woman I am, despite the hardships, the pain, the years of simply scraping through.

She talked about my girlfriends, too—how she accepted Allegra, outright despised Angie, tolerated the rest, but absolutely adored Amelia, and told me not to let her go. Don't ever leave Amelia, she said. She's perfect for you. I didn't argue. Some things don't need correcting.

I told her about the wildness that came after—coming out at sixteen, the women, running away and joining the fire department, hitchhiking, trying weed before I was old enough to vote, freight hopping, giving my parents hell at every turn. She laughed, soft and tired. Said raising me was an adventure, sure, but the greatest one she ever had, because she got to be my friend first and my mother second.

Mom suggested I go get dinner from the hospital cafeteria. The food is good here, she said. I knew she was lying, but I smiled anyway. It was the kind of lie meant to keep you from leaving too soon. I could see it in her eyes—the small flicker that said stay just a little longer, even if we pretend you're going for food.

I took the bait. Told her I'd be right back. Downstairs, the air smelled faintly like bleach and overcooked vegetables. I ordered pork bites, mashed potatoes, and a Mountain Dew—comfort food in the most literal sense. The cashier asked me to open my food container, but didn't look up as I paid with my credit card. I remember thinking how strange it was to do something as ordinary as swipe for a meal while time itself was running out upstairs.

I figured now was as good a time as any to tell mom the things I wasn't exactly proud of. The ones I'd kept filed away in the back of my mind, marked not for parental review. I asked if it would be alright—if I could share a few secrets I'd never said out loud.

She sighed, already amused, and said, "Emily, if your secret is that you watched a pornographic movie, I don't care."

"Seen one?" I said. "I was in one once."

She laughed. Actually laughed. A small, startled sound that filled the room like a flash of color in grayscale. Then came a shrug—soft, half a wince—and for a second I saw what the month in the hospital had done to her hands. Bruised, bandaged in places, both wrists looped with those plastic bracelets that reduce a person to a barcode.

I tried to keep the conversation light after that, but something in me started to brace. That instinct I learned on the job—hope for the best, but be prepared for the worst. I could feel the air in the room tightening, like it already knew what was coming.

I tried to lighten the mood. Told her about the stupid, funny things—like the times the police brought me home a few times for streaking. She laughed, the kind of laugh that comes from deep memory, not breath. For a moment, it felt like we were just us again—mother and daughter trading stories, not a patient and her kid sitting under fluorescent mercy.

Then she looked at me with that faraway softness, the one that says this part matters. She told me she loved me—plain, certain, final. And then she said, When you get home, go straight to the attic.

I asked what she meant. She just smiled, the way people do when they've already decided not to explain. I could tell she was fading, the edges of her sentences starting to blur. I wanted to press, but something in me said let it be. There'd be time to figure it out later. At least, that's what I told myself.

For the past forty-six years and eighty-nine days, our maps matched up. I didn't think of it that way until after she was gone—how we'd been quietly tracing the same grid the whole time. Same lines of latitude, same cities and small towns, same stubborn gravity pulling us back into each other's orbit. She was my first lifetime friendship, though I never used that word with her. Friendship. It felt too soft for what it was. We were just—inexplicably linked.

There were years when we drifted, sure, but even then the coordinates still lined up. I could feel her there, somewhere on the same map, breathing under the same sky. That's the strange thing about mothers—you start out sharing a body, then a roof, then a silence, and somehow it still counts as together.

Now the maps don't match anymore. Hers ends where mine keeps going. I keep catching myself checking as if maybe this is all a bad dream, almosrt as if somehow I'll find her name printed in the margins. Maybe I still will.

(The obituary I wrote for mom can be found here.)