“The quality of your death matters, mom. You know that.” I reply. She looks away and nods. “Sometimes you don’t get to choose that.”

I don’t want her to die alone in a hospital.

Her back and legs have been bad for a while now, ever since the home invasion five years ago. The young men pinned her to her couch with a pillow over her head demanding that she give them her money and her gun. “I’m Canadian,” she told them, as though somehow that would explain everything. They ransacked her house, took the $150 that she had rolled up in her freezer. They got her safe open but didn’t recognize the nearly 300 Euros that fell across the floor. When they demanded that she unlock her iPhone, she was nervous and couldn’t remember the passcode. They fired two bullets into the wall above her head to let her know they were serious. She tells me that this was when she calmly offered them a beer. They didn’t know that this wasn’t the first time my mom had been shot at.

She looks like a little old lady now, but she was a nurse in Quang Ngai during the Tet Offensive in 1968. She has pulled shrapnel out of babies. She once stole a helicopter from a bunch of drunk GIs. The men left her house disappointed, with a locked phone and $150. They would carjack one person and shoot another later that night.

After they were gone, she took the pillow off her head and hobbled over to her neighbor’s house. It was midnight. My phone was on vibrate, but the text woke me. “Your mother is okay,” it said. “You should come to her house now.” When I got there, mom was sitting quietly on the edge of her couch, the cushions ripped open and glass everywhere. She looked up at me and smiled. “It doesn’t matter if I go,” she said that night.

It might not matter to my mom how she dies, but it does to me. COVID is taking her generation right out from underneath our noses, while we are stuck in Zoom meetings. If they go to the hospital, we might not even get to say goodbye.

Just last week, my friend Chrystos informed me that the death toll was 68,932—a number that she wrote on her palm with a magic marker because she couldn’t find a piece of paper, and she wanted me to see it, to stare at that magnitude. That senseless loss. Those mothers gone like whispers while our leaders dither over mask ordinances and how hard to come down on the Shelley Luthers of the nation. Today the number is 77,734. All I can think as I bite into my sandwich is that each one of those people had to die alone. If only we had acted sooner, maybe we could have saved some of them.

Happy Mother’s Day.