I labor to deliver her through a fog of drugs and the hospital sounds of rubber shoes on lino, the beep of monitors, the hum of florescent lighting, the too-cold air and smell of latex gloves.

She slips through the veil, slips on her skin, and becomes. Despite the classes and books, I am completely unprepared for the ways in which my life changes, both banal and profound. From one moment to the next I am a different person, transformed into a mother. At twenty years and eight months of age, I become.

I gaze upon her wizened face in wonder, enraptured, overwhelmed, entranced. I cannot believe I made her. I cannot look away.

Motherhood settles on my skin like a rash. I itch and twitch and rail against it, at times denying it entirely.

She is the only child in my world for a while, but then cousins, sisters, and godchildren arrive, and she becomes the queen of all the kids. They look to her for how to be in the world, and she conceives a character, Miss Martine, who tutors them in social graces at her School of Charm and Etiquette.

She is a lover of books, an especial fan of the adventures of Nancy Drew. Like Nancy she is neat and orderly, her hair worn long and decorated with tasteful and expensive clips. She wears pearls in her ears. She negotiates contracts of employment with me and, on one occasion, quits over working conditions not up to her exacting standard. She styles herself the arbiter of all things right and good in our world. Her judgement is swift, cutting, never questionable.

She reaches pinnacle of her young life on the day she drives her little red shiny car to stand on stage at uni to accept an academic prize, her name projected large on a screen behind her, a self-satisfied grin on her face. This is the summit she has set her sights on, and she has attained it. She stands, smug and victorious.

Her aspirations become smaller and I watch her life move into reverse, each hard-won milestone taken from her in order of acquisition.

First to go is her ability to drive, and she grudgingly acquiesces to the indignity of becoming, once more, a passenger in my car, situating herself within its disorder, the odd socks and ice block sticks of a childhood she has already left behind.

In the natural order, her friends leave home, move far away for study, but she is trapped here by illness, dependency. I build a studio for her in the forest near my home. She paints it white, installs white furniture, white timber blinds.

She defers her studies, the drugs in her system denying her the ability to stay awake; she is unable to watch the lectures and take in the readings, the case law, she should be committing to memory. Confined to bed, she binge-watches Judge Judy and obsessively studies the careers of female judges.

Picking up a new copy of an old book, she begins to read to her youngest sister. So begins a daily ritual lasting until she can no longer draw the breath for an entire sentence; here the roles reverse and her sister takes over. I listen as I stir the dinner, silent tears dripping into the soup of despair I prepare for my children.

My bed becomes a sickbed, littered with the detritus of her decline—bloodied tissues, pill packets, tubes, and special pillows. The floor is festooned with clumps of her golden hair. Then, when breath fails her, she lies propped on a hospital bed surrounded by pillows, attached to monitors and to a gas outlet on the wall, hostage there until I can organise oxygen for home.

I run a power lead through the forest to my neighbor’s house, saving us from the incessant drone of the generator.

One night she coughs and wets the bed; she’s stricken, tears threatening, face averted to deny the sight of the bed sheets in my arms in the morning. I start out with buying thick sanitary pads, then when discretion retreats in the face of failure, incontinence pads. Even these do not suffice in the end and she cries bitter tears, hating herself, hating her body for failing her so.

The wheelchair, when it arrives, brings a curl of disgust to her lip. It is hospital issue, stained, grey vinyl and rusty chrome. I disinfect it thoroughly and she consents to sit, touching as little as possible of its surface.

I build a ramp from the driveway to the house.

Miss Martine makes one final appearance, though she dozes and nods off in the spring afternoon as her young charges sit up straight, completing their composition books.

The day I bathe her in the hospital shower cubicle, slumped in a plastic chair and unable to lift her arms or adjust her position to help me, is the day my heart becomes the biggest it has ever been. It swells so large in my chest that it pains me and I feel the pressure of it right up behind my eyeballs.

She struggles to remain in this world, to keep a hold of her earthly body, tethered here by plastic tubes. She begins to move between the worlds and shares with us the seemingly unconnected visions swimming before her eyes. I watch as she disintegrates. I can’t look away. I don’t want to miss a moment.

After what seems a lifetime of hypervigilance, of acute attunement to the hiss and wheeze of oxygen delivery, as I sleep the slumber of the exhausted she slips away, leaving behind her shell on the bed to settle into decay—the blood pooling, muscles slackening, skin fading to unearthly white. I awake, and she is gone.

She has been on this earth for twenty years and eight months.

On the day of her death her sisters and I gather around her lifeless body and share the final chapter in the Nancy Drew book we have been reciting together for weeks. The chapter’s title?

“The Happy Finale.”

My empty embrace becomes an ache which fills me with an absence, a longing which is physically painful and felt in every fibre of my being. Despite my years of preparation, the books devoured, the epiphanies and understanding I thought I’d grasped, nothing could prepare me for the loss of her. From one moment to the next, I lose myself.

Rebecca Ryall is a full-time solo mum and full-time student of creative arts, living off grid in the middle of the forest in northern NSW Australia. She is currently completing a Bachelor of Arts at Southern Cross University in Lismore, majoring in creative writing and cultural studies. Her work has appeared in BentStreet Journal, Baby Teeth Journal, Northerly Magazine, and the upcoming anthology Coastlines 7, as well as being performed as part of the Monologue Adventures in 2018.