She Keeps Telling Me Her Time Is Limited

She’s not afraid of dying. But I’m deathly afraid of losing her.

Mom loves her villa. It’s a two-bedroom. The room I sleep in now was once her office, with a futon folded into a couch lined with pillows until guests slept over. The printer and fax machine are still here. I’ve asked many times if she’d move them, especially after being woken by spam faxes in the middle of the night. But she always refused—“That’s where the phone cable is.”

Thankfully, she finally got rid of the dedicated fax number. The middle-of-the-night interruptions have stopped. But the printer remains a little relic of the way things have always been.

The room itself is small, tucked right off the entrance, next to the kitchen and guest bathroom. I’ve done what I can to carve out space—a couple of Wayfair fabric dressers, the kind where the drawers lift out completely. There’s an old filing cabinet, a bookcase stacked on top of a white dresser. It’s a little cave for me, just big enough to hold what I need.

Mom’s bedroom, by contrast, is spacious, with floor-to-ceiling windows and the same vertical blinds she’s had since the early ’90s. Almost everything in her home dates back decades. The dishwasher from when they moved in still runs just fine. “They don’t make them like they used to,” she says—and she’s probably right.

The toilet in my bathroom is worn and weary. Rust settles in the bowl if I don’t keep up with it, and the internal parts are tired. I’m gentle with it, flushing sparingly, aware that even small breakdowns feel heavy these days.

Above the toilet, a shelf holds a lineup of Reader’s Digests, standing neatly between bookends. Beside my bed is a basket loaded with old magazines—Time, featuring Moshe Dayan on the cover from 1967, and others that seem frozen in time. The past lingers in this house, quietly filling the corners.

But the heart of the home now is Mom’s bed. It’s where she spends nearly all of her time, lying on her left side, her hip pressing against the guardrail I added after she fell. I found that bed rail on Amazon, desperate to keep her safe.

The truth is, I’m always watching her.

Ever since we installed the Ring cameras in January 2020, after she broke her shoulder falling at my brother’s, I’ve been glued to the app on my phone. It gives me some peace of mind, knowing I can keep an eye on her, even when I’m not in the room. Twice, those cameras let me catch her on the ground, and get help to her in time.

But it’s a double-edged sword—part comfort, part obsession. Like scrolling Instagram, I find myself checking again and again. Only this time, I’m not looking for a new post—I’m looking for movement. Proof of life. Watching to see if she has shifted positions. Wondering, is she alive? Is she breathing?

Sometimes, her breathing is so heavy, I can hear it through the camera. Other times, there’s only stillness, and I sit frozen, watching, waiting.

Mom tells me often now that she doesn’t have much time left. She’s not afraid of dying. “You can’t live forever,” she reminds me. But lately, her words have become more pointed, urging me to stay close, not to run off to the library or the café to work, to spend my time with her while I still can.

It’s hard. Her house is small, and I need space to think, to breathe, to write. But I hear her. And I know she’s right.

So I’ll wrap this up. There are groceries to get—Costco, Trader Joe’s, Aldi—and lunch to prepare for Mom. Then I’ll return to her side, where I belong right now.

Because time, as she keeps telling me, is running out.

Gayle Kirschenbaum is an Emmy-winning filmmaker, photographer, writer, coach, and speaker. Her film LOOK AT US NOW, MOTHER! premiered on Netflix and has been credited with transforming lives. Her TED talk is “No More Drama with Mama.” Gayle co-authored Mildred's Mindset: Wisdom from a Woman Centenarian with her mother, centenarian influencer Mildred Kirschenbaum. Gayle's upcoming memoir is Bullied to Besties: A Daughter's Journey to Forgiveness.
To learn more visit GayleKirschenbaum.com.
Follow Gayle & Mildred on Instagram and TikTok @glkirschenbaum