I would love an invitation to the White House today. But at 17, it wasn't cool. It was so bourgeois. My sister and I were placard-carrying antiwar demonstrators, and my waist-length hair, long skirts and beads were an expression of my distaste for everything my parents stood for. That their daughters were part of a counterculture opposing the policies of the U.S. government didn't seem to register on my parents. So when the invitation came for the annual White House Christmas party, my mother issued the order: You're going to the White House, you're going to look good, and you're going to behave. My mother was a former Marine sergeant. You didn't argue.

My sister and I weren't the big statement kind of people; ours was a more subtle form of protest. Lighting a joint seemed innocent enough. We also thought it would be pretty cool to smoke a joint before going, too. So, while my mother sat on a stool in the kitchen having a scotch and soda while she waited for my father to change upstairs, my sister and I got high in my third-floor bedroom, blowing the smoke out a dormer window cracked against the December cold.

It's pretty strange being stoned around your parents, even stranger when you're stoned around police, security guards, officials of every sort, and a huge crowd of children and adults giddy with excitement and anticipation. And you're in the White House.

Was I smiling too broadly? Were my eyes glazed? And where was my sister? I found myself wandering through the rooms alone, overwhelmed by the opulence. Actually, my parents and younger brother were nearby, sampling cookies and punch. I was sure I was being followed. Were there drug-sniffing dogs then?

I had to go the bathroom. When I came out of the stall I saw my sister across the bathroom standing by the sink. She put her thumb and forefinger together as if holding a joint and brought it to her lips. Between us were a half-dozen women and children. She smiled. As I pushed past her I told her I didn't want to, that it was too dangerous, and left before she could pull me back into a stall with her.

But something was happening in the hall. There were quiet murmurs. There he is, I overheard people saying. And when I followed their gaze I saw the president among the crowd. He was making his way through the party, laughing and talking, greeting people by their first names. He seemed comfortable. And happy. We must have been standing near the band because all of a sudden Nixon was sitting at a piano playing and singing Christmas carols. Somehow, not by my own volition, I was in the group nearest him. There I was, stoned, singing with the president. I remember thinking he seemed just like a regular person, that he was just a man. In many ways he reminded me of my father.

I don't remember anything else about that night. At home, my sister and I probably went directly up to my room on the third floor, spent a couple of hours watching television, and pulled out that joint in my purse. We probably laughed at how messed-up we had been and how it would have been impossible to actually carry out our plan. It didn't take me long to understand that the act of defiance my sister and I planned had more to do with youthful ignorance than political activism. It took me much longer to grasp that my sister's interest in all things mind- and mood-altering was an addiction. And finally there is this: As much as I hated the Vietnam war and Watergate and came to revile Richard Nixon, I have to admit I cried when he died. I hated him, but still, I cried. In some ways I felt sorry for him, for whatever had happened in his life that created the demons he carried with him, for surely that must explain -- at least in part -- who he became. Of all the images of Richard Nixon that flash through my mind -- those pictures of him defiant, angry, even crazed-looking -- I always come back to him at that Christmas party, sitting at a piano singing Christmas carols. 

When I grew up, I played with Legos. I never dreamed of baking or tea parties. I had dolls, but I didn't think they had feelings or needed to have their diapers changed. Then, when I was 9, my mother had my sister and I experienced all the hellish joys of raising an infant. My sister was a great kid, but by the time I was 25, I was quite sure that she was the only child I was ever going to have.

Like Brittany Shoot, the author of "Why I Got My Tubes Tied at 27," I was sure enough that I researched getting my tubes tied and was open about it with any serious boyfriends I had over the years. With my last ex-boyfriend we had even gone to a doctor to inquire about vasectomy. The doctor told us that at 28 my ex-boyfriend was way too young and no one was going to do anything for me for a long time. Like Shoot, I heard the same lines about being too young and how I would change my mind. It even angered some people when I dared to defend my choices.

Hey, I liked dogs. I always said I'd love to have a dog. I love big dogs, like Alaskan Malamutes. I envisioned myself getting old with an Alaskan Malamute as my companion. Walking outside, my attention didn't snag when I passed toddlers and strollers. I only saw dogs. It was the dogs that I would ask about. Whenever I'd pass one, I'd get an instant urge to swoop down and cradle whatever big-nosed creature was looking up at me with moist black eyes. I would want to squeeze it. Pet it. Eat it. I wanted to eat its face. In a loving way. I wanted to eat its face in the loving, urgent, instinctive way.

With babies, if they were suddenly and sneakily wheeled in front of me, I just wanted them to go away. I didn't want to hold them. I wanted to hold puppies. Some people probably thought that made me a bit of a bitch.

Childless and defensive, I made it to my 30s. By then, I was with someone who didn't want children as much as I didn't want them. He was in a couple of serious relationships before ours that ended because of the child issue. I knew this when we met and it was one of the things that I liked about him -- this solid stance. He also carried a birth-defect gene. Although this wasn't the main motivator behind our decision to be child-free, it pretty much sealed the deal.

We talked about getting a dog if we ever moved out of the city. We decided on a Newfoundland. We looked at houses in the country. Two bedrooms were our minimal requirement; we would convert one into an office. But country homes were too much work and we loved our freedom, so we ended up putting money down on a downtown condo development instead, one bedroom, on the 13th floor. I started dreaming about a fitting, condo-friendly dog: a whippet.

As our relationship got real-estate-serious, we began to talk more seriously about permanent birth-control options -- vasectomy or tubal ligation. This time the ages were more suitable: me over 30, him over 40. I had had a pregnancy scare before so I wanted to ensure it wouldn't happen again.

And then I got pregnant. And we decided to keep it.

We decided to have this baby because I couldn't go through the grief of another termination. We decided to have it because my partner's father died and the sense of mortality transformed from a needle falling on glass to a gong. We decided to have this baby because I went to see the first ultrasound at 12 weeks, and they made me listen to the heartbeat, and they said "baby" as if the primordial blob was one, a baby, indeed. We decided to have this baby because my partner secretly changed his mind after watching a friend of his adopt a daughter.

So we had him. The first three months were awesome. We ate rainbows for breakfast. We kept him in a wicker basket beside our bed. We shivered with love over his impossibly beautiful ears, eyes, everything. His wet diapers, yes. Even his inherited birth defect was so minor that it gave us very little to worry about.

We sold the condo, bought a house with a baby room.

And then it -- they -- caught up with us: our true child-free selves.

As all parents do, we too had to renegotiate our lifestyles. But because we're both in artistic fields, our lifestyles also mean our lives, period. After those pink-clouded first three months it suddenly seemed very cruel to have to give up huge chunks of who we were in order to cater to this … blob who was now undeniably 100 percent human. This is what we struggled with most.

As all parents know, nothing is more important than a wet, hungry baby. Nothing. Not even the column you have to file or the photograph you really need to send out. You can't just leave the house, slam the door behind you. Go to three art openings, stay up till 5, have a lot of drinks.

I had a lot of drinks, eventually. I couldn't handle it, the change. And my partner got very ill. We made it through both, the drinks and the illness. We ended up going for counseling where every week we work on reconciling our old selves with the new ones. In our sessions we mourn our wild child-free ways. But we're getting over our shock slowly and our bafflement has started to scab over a little now.

Should child rearing be left to people who want it? Not necessarily. It turns out, I love being a mother. I love everything about it, even the tantrums on the floor, bloody snot and painful pinching of my breasts included. My partner and I will often put the baby to bed and then will spend the next hour or so looking at photographs of him from when he was a newborn. We often neglect to eat our breakfast because we're staring at our son eating his. We talk about him on our very rare nights out, even though we promise ourselves we won't behave so pathetically. We both look at kids and babies all the time now; there's an entire world of these amazing creatures with their giant cartoon eyes and serious frowns and fat feet. Incredible. I know now that, as far as experiences go, this is the one that you absolutely must have before you can know for sure what you want. Of course, by then -- it's too late to change your mind.

Before that night, I'd had passing thoughts that if life wasn't less agonizing by the time I turned, say, 50, I'd end it. It had come to seem normal; that was just where my brain went when I was overwhelmed by stress, unhappiness, exhaustion. I would picture myself falling upon a sword, like some kind of medieval maiden, a (not quite) virgin sacrifice. I'd mentioned these "suicidal ideations" to my shrink, kind of laughing them off, and, indeed, she never seemed too concerned. "I can be so melodramatic," I'd say.

Jumping off a bridge, when you happen to be on the bridge in question, was different. I'd been weeping the whole way up the cyclist path, but it wasn't until I reached the top that the idea took on a startling power. As I stood there in the darkness, watching the cars pass beneath me, I suddenly felt like a real threat to myself. If I lost my balance and fell off the beam into the traffic before I made it all the way out, the impact surely wouldn't kill me, but would a car? If I did jump, what would happen after I hit the water? Would I break so many bones that I'd die immediately? Or would I drown?

I'd never thought of myself as seriously depressed. Sure, my childhood had been unhappy -- my mother died of cancer; my father and I fought bitterly and constantly; I spent four months of my freshmen year of high school hospitalized for anorexia -- and I'd evolved into a brooder. But by my early 30s, mental illness seemed long gone. I had some "issues" to "work through" -- I had problems getting into healthy romantic relationships, I made impractical career moves, I refused to give up on certain unrealistic dreams -- but hey, that describes half of New York.

My real problem, I would've told you, was exhaustion. Not that I didn't have time to sleep; it's that I couldn't. My insomnia started eight years before, after one of my best friends killed himself on his 28th birthday. (He'd taken Ecstasy for the first time, which led to a manic fit, followed by a severe crash.) In the following weeks and months, I would wake up in the middle of the night, haunted by questions: Why had he done it? Why hadn't he told me what he was thinking?

Eventually, I came to terms with his death, but my sleeping never returned to normal. The slightest sound could stir me, and I'd be up till dawn, or I'd awake suddenly after six or seven hours, even eight, feeling grainy and exhausted but unable to go back to sleep. I did all the things that are supposed to improve sleep quality: I used a white noise machine, earplugs, an eye mask. I exercised regularly, maintained a regular sleep-wake schedule as best I could, quit booze entirely, and even gave up caffeine (for a while). Nothing worked. I plodded through my days with a strange hangover -- an achiness, like I was always on the verge of getting the flu. Sleeping pills were only a temporary relief. Both Benadryl and melatonin worked, but left me in a groggy daze.

My exhaustion shaped -- or mangled -- my life. I became flaky about meeting up with friends. I'd say yes to social outings, then bail at the last minute. Whenever I managed to get involved with a guy, I rarely spent the night at his place; if he stayed at mine, I pulled out the love seat. Luckily, I was able to work as a freelance writer, because after a few years, I couldn't imagine ever having a 9-to-5 job again. Often, I simply could not make it through the day without napping. It's embarrassing to remember all those awful customer service calls, where I'd try to explain whatever computer problem or Internet issue I was having, only to break down in tears while the disembodied voice on the other line tried to calm me down. I'd cry on the mat at the gym or on the subway platform because I felt so tired that trying to retain my posture and composure till I got home seemed daunting. On one occasion, I fell apart in front of my former landlord, who took me in her arms and gently suggested Prozac. I appreciated her compassion, but depression wasn't my problem. Fatigue was.

By the time I found myself contemplating diving off the edge of Manhattan, I felt out of options: I'd tried everything to no avail. A life of chronic debilitation just didn't seem worth living. The straw that broke the camel's back was absurdly minor: That night, an ex, who I'd assumed would try to reconcile with me eventually, told me he had a new girlfriend. I didn't want to get back together with him but I'd been propping myself up with the idea that he loved me, and even minor setbacks like realizing he didn't required more energy than I had. How could I possibly slog through another half-lifetime of them?

Before that day, being at the top of the Brooklyn Bridge had lifted my spirits during some of my bleakest moments. I loved the urban majesty: the red-pink sun sinking between Jersey and downtown Manhattan; the yellow moon that sometimes hangs so low over Brooklyn it's nearly hidden among the building tops; the train crawling along the Manhattan Bridge like some outsize glowworm. To stand on that bridge was to feel on top of New York City -- for once!

But on that terrible night, life didn't seem full of grandeur and possibility; it seemed relentless. Directly in front of me was a way out. Knowing how exhilarated I normally felt there made me realize I wasn't in my right mind; so did the sense of terror that dominated some part of my consciousness. Moved by my body more than my brain, I pushed my bike down to street level, too vertiginous to ride. When I got home, I knew I was clinically depressed.

The next day -- feeling furious with my shrink for letting me get to such a scary low -- I paid an emergency visit to my physician. After I told her what had happened, she prescribed an antidepressant, explaining my fatigue was probably either caused by, or a symptom of, depression.

After a few weeks on Celexa, I found myself sleeping remarkably well and feeling healthier, happier and more stable than I had in nearly a decade. All sorts of things began to seem possible again -- going away on vacation, working for hours at a stretch, making social plans in advance. The one negative side effect: Though I was eating less and exercising a bit more, I was rapidly gaining weight. So my doctor and I experimented with a number of alternatives till we found a good medication cocktail; now, I'm taking Wellbutrin along with five milligrams of an herbal supplement called 5-HTP (a precursor to melatonin, a neurochemical the body makes to put itself to sleep) before bed. I haven't felt so good since high school.

I'd never attached any real stigma to psychopharmaceutical drugs. I appreciated how crucial they were for people with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, and saw firsthand how much antidepressants had helped my father after decades of mood swings. All the same, I had the impression that most of the people I knew who were taking them didn't really need them; they all seemed so well-adjusted! (Funny how that works, isn't it?) Now I appreciate just how crucial they can be for functioning. And when I saw the reports that they don't help cases of mild depression, all I could think was, "Welp, mine must've been serious, because they sure work for me."

This week marks two years since my night on the bridge. And though I still have occasional dreary moments, offing myself no longer seems appealing, not now or 10 years down the road. I don't cry uncontrollably in public anymore. I can take the subway without fear I'll have an emotional breakdown somewhere underneath New York City. I can depend on my body to come through for me and restore itself when darkness falls. My morale is sturdier, too. When I bike over the Brooklyn Bridge these days, I don't feel fear. I feel happy. I feel alive.

In early 2012, Free Press will publish the book that Maura Kelly is co-writing, tentatively titled, "Jane, Don't Err: What Great Literature Can Teach Us About Moby Dickheads, Brief Wondrous Relationships, and Love in the Time of Internet Dating."

In the two decades since then, the only thing that's changed is that conversations about my fertility have become even more polarized and strained. As I entered my mid- to late-20s, folks started asking when I'll start a family (as if I don't already have one). Once, a stranger at a party poked my belly and asked when I might start showing. Apparently it doesn't occur to people that asking about my fertility might be a bit invasive, akin to asking a stranger about her weight or, say, his prostate. Apparently it doesn't occur to them that I will not offer one of two palatable answers: I'll have kids soon, or I'll get around to it eventually.

The honest answer tends to make people defensive, even though that isn't my intention: I can't have children. Earlier this year, at the age of 27, I voluntarily had my tubes tied.

How common is my situation? It's hard to know precisely. According to the CDC, only 1 percent of women in the U.S. who've had no children have been sterilized. Of all American women who've had the surgery, a little over 10 percent are under 30. Although medical guidelines reflect that the procedure is safe, the Internet abounds with horror stories about women 35 and under who encountered great resistance from doctors convinced they would later regret the choice. An article provided by the National Sexuality Resource Center quotes a doctor who summarizes that reluctance: "A woman who is twenty-five and says, 'That’s it, I've made my choice,' I would probably just have to say, 'You're making a twenty-five year old choice. You sure that’s going to be a thirty-eight or thirty-nine year old choice?'" Friends have told me stories about the disbelief and rude remarks they faced when they asked their doctors about Essure or other forms of permanent birth control.

I never thought that not doing something would make people feel so combative. But as soon as the topic turns to pregnancy or child rearing, it's never a simple case of differing opinions. It's never easy for me when someone begins a conversation by telling me, "When you have children ..." and it's taken me a long time to figure out how to politely nod or walk away from what feels like an inquisition about my reproductive choices -- because, trust me, casual answers don't work. When I mention that I don't intend to have kids, people often try to talk me out of it. They tell me I couldn't know such a thing at my age, that I'll change my mind eventually. A former colleague once sidled up at a holiday party and, perhaps bolstered by some liquid courage, cautioned that my unborn children were lucky I hadn't yet ruined their lives with my selfishness.

To me, it's odd and a bit twisted: The very people who want to hold up child rearing as the most fulfilling and amazing job ever can be the same people who don't give actual children -- let alone adults -- credit for knowing what they want. Raising children is incredibly demanding. Shouldn't we leave it to the people who really want it?

Over the years, I'd had ex-boyfriends balk at the idea that I wouldn't have their babies. But when I met Andreas, my now-husband, that just wasn't the case. Our relationship was strong enough to overcome the fact that we lived in different places and came from different countries (he's Danish) -- but being forever child-free was never a major hurdle.

We were three days into our intense courtship, wandering around a Boston art museum, when I brought it up. I'd chosen a day when half of the Southie elementary schools let their charges loose for the afternoon. Kids had been shrieking and crashing into us all day, coming dangerously close to the exhibit pieces, and I finally looked at Andreas and said, "You know this isn't for me, right? No kids. Never." Terrified I might have sabotaged our chance to make it work, I started to cry.

Andreas pulled me down to sit at a steel table in the brightly lit cafeteria. He clasped my hands tightly and studied my face for a moment, and I wondered why he couldn't be an inattentive jerk who looked around at the art instead. I squirmed uncomfortably, in what felt like the longest 10 seconds of my life. "In all honesty, I just don't care," he said. He was smiling. "If you don't want to have kids, we won't. My life won't be ruined. It might even be better."

When we moved to Denmark a year later, temporarily choosing to live in Andreas' home country after he'd moved to Boston for me, I was immediately enrolled in the Danish state-run healthcare system. My prescriptions were cheaper, and my doctor's visits and a range of surgical procedures were fully covered. While a good friend back in the States was struggling to convince her doctor to give her an IUD, I was eligible for a tubal ligation -- a free one at that.

Why weren't my birth control pills good enough? That's a fair question. While there are arguably millions of women who don't mind hormonal contraceptives, I'm unfortunately not one of them. After battling lifelong migraines, which used to strike as often as twice a week, several particularly frightening episodes involving public vomiting and near blindness while traveling forced me to consider tossing my contraceptive of choice. I'd done nearly everything else possible to get rid of my headaches and had some success. But maybe the pills were at the root of my problem.

While it arguably would have been easier for my partner to have a vasectomy -- one good friend's male partner got the snip when he was just 20, no questions asked -- Andreas had a surgery scare when he was 10 that he wasn't eager to repeat. Besides, I was the one who wanted to throw out my pills, and I'd ultimately be the one to suffer the physical consequences if I ended up unintentionally pregnant.

In a way, it was also a challenge that I couldn't resist. Anyone who's ever questioned having children probably knows that while doctors bend over backward to help infertile couples conceive, intentionally childless couples aren't really taken seriously. In the end, I got the surgery because I wanted it. It wasn't really a debate.

Or, as my stout, no-nonsense gynecologist Ulla said about sterilization during our first visit: "You're over 25, so you can do whatever you'd like."

I later met with another doctor, who gave me the standard warning that some people regret the procedure. Then asked, "Why do you want to have this done?"

My partner and I exchanged glances before I blurted out, "Do you really want the entire list?" I gave her a few of my pat answers about lack of maternal instinct, low pain tolerance and concerns about overpopulation before she signaled that I was competent to become intentionally sterile. My surgery was scheduled for one week later.

On a gray summer morning, we took the first train of the day to catch a bus connection, which snaked through a Copenhagen suburb to the end of the line where the route terminated at an unobtrusive two-story hospital straight out of the 1970s. My surgeon, a woman in a headscarf who called herself Dr. Nana, told me she'd take very good care of me and asked me one last time, "Are you sure?" I wondered if she had to make certain that my husband didn't coerce me, and I wondered how often that happens. I thought about women who might back out at the last minute and wondered who they could be. The last thing I remember was my flamboyant Swedish anesthesiologist, who'd confessed that he also didn't want children, stroking my hair as he adjusted my gas mask.

What's funny about having my tubes tied -- my fallopian tubes permanently sealed with little clasps on each -- is how much it kept reminding me of childbirth. At my intake exam, my partner quickly moved to sit by my shoulders when the doctors asked that I pop my feet into the stirrups to make sure everything looked fine. "I've learned a thing or two from those scary birth shows," he said, motioning to the speculum, clearly uninterested in sneaking a peek in a clinical setting. Waking up after surgery, Lamaze-like breathing exercises helped the pain subside enough that I was able to sit up. In the aftermath, people unfamiliar with my choice have also asked me the same sorts of questions I'd no doubt ask pregnant women or new mothers if I didn't know better. More than a few friends have wondered whether I will continue to menstruate and still have all of my reproductive organs (the answer to both is yes).

Meanwhile, my body adjusted quickly. I've had exactly one migraine since surgery, which, for someone who used to have regular nausea-inducing neuralgia, is kind of a miracle. In the right company, I show off my scar, a small red line above my pubic hair that's received a few laughs from amused friends when I yank at my waistband with glee. Sex without fear of unwanted pregnancy has been freeing and fun, and I still sometimes marvel that I so easily obtained what I'd always wanted. How often in life do we actually get what we desire?

Last month, a good friend confided over coffee that she's two months pregnant. As we hugged and cried, she confessed that I was the person she'd most wanted to tell. "All of my other friends are trying to get pregnant like it's a competition," she said. "It's so nice that you have your fertility choices all sorted out." I couldn't agree more.

Brittany Shoot is a freelance writer based in Copenhagen and Boston. Find her at Brittanyshoot.com.

When your partner is dying, the idea of a shiny new Lexus as a symbol of commitment -- to anything other than monthly payments -- becomes particularly odious; "diamonds are forever" takes on depressing new meaning (because life isn't forever). No, love isn't "a car in the driveway with a big bow on top." It's pushing a wheelchair. It's cutting off all of your lover's hair as it begins to fall out in large clumps during chemo, and massaging that patchy head to give her one of the few physical pleasures left to her. It's laughing while browsing a wig shop where the only other customer is a transvestite prostitute. It's relearning how to cook after three decades of marriage. It's giving shots through a layer of belly fat. It's sitting side-by-side in a hospital bed watching TV.

Of course, it isn't any revelation that advertisers seize on and exploit our deepest desires. It's just that cancer has a way of magnifying the absurdity of selling love. Much as my world is profoundly distorted by anticipatory grief right now, I don't actually believe those above images of love enduring through illness would make for successful advertising; I realize most people prefer to fantasize about having a diamond slipped on their finger rather than having a hand to hold during chemo. But -- reporting live from this place of personal crisis -- I truly cannot imagine anything more beautiful or romantic than the love that passes between them these days.

Last weekend, my mom, still flabbergasted, whispered to me that my dad had offered to put up the Christmas decorations. The most enthusiasm he's ever displayed for the holidays is when he's blown up the tree the day after Christmas. (He's a mad scientist by profession and likes making things go "boom.") That is to say: The only enthusiasm he's shown over Christmas is for destroying all signs of it. But this year my mom is too delicate to put up decorations -- the cancer has spread from her lungs and begun to eat away at her bones. She can't hike up and down the basement steps lugging boxes full of miniature Dickensian cottages, cobbled streets and fake snow.

So, he's volunteered to decorate. It is absurd, the idea of him trying to set up the detailed village -- with all its ice skaters, carolers and horse-drawn carriages; the image of him hanging ornaments from the tree is one of equally entertaining dissonance. This is what strong families do in crisis: They adapt and roles change. Just as my my father has suddenly, and enthusiastically, retired his Grinchly ways, I have found myself returning but a vanishing fraction of my mom's many years of caretaking. I've gotten a great deal of satisfaction from calmly talking her through a morphine-induced hallucination, helping her to the bathroom and reminding her while she apologizes for throwing up in front of me that I've thrown up on her (to which she replied, "But not in a very long time, honey"). I suppose that's one definition of love: You do something for someone else and it ends up feeling like a gift to yourself.

My mom gets serious personal satisfaction from gift giving and, as an only child, I've reaped most of the benefits. My adult wardrobe largely consists of clothing she's bought me over the years. It is obscenely lucky -- but it's nothing compared to the experience of watching her grace and strength in the wake of her diagnosis. That's the funny thing about Christmas: You spend your childhood wanting things, wanting more stuff. Now, of course, I'd trade it all just to keep what I already had.

I recently caught myself wondering darkly, "What kind of Christmas present do you get for someone who's dying?" Gifts are so obviously irrelevant this year -- but, really, they're irrelevant every year. My mom -- the one who is dying, the one whose mutated cells are waging war on her own body -- never got a diamond ring or a luxury car in her 32-year marriage, and yet these days she cries and says things like, "I just feel so lucky to have had my two loves."

Although we often accepted UPS packages for each other, I had never consulted my neighbor the priestess before, aside from the standard chicken foot above my door for luck. I didn't know where to begin. "I'm looking for something for my mother," I said, as if picking out something for her to wear. And then I had to tell her the details of my mother's terminal illness. I wasn't used to saying it out loud. My family spoke mostly in euphemisms about things like this; 9/11 was "the incident," Katrina was "the storm," and my mother's aplastic anemia was "her condition." The priestess suggested healing salts, or a special candle, but my mother's compromised immune system made those options forbidden.

"We could do a gris-gris bag," she suggested. "You'll have to bring nail and hair clippings."

"How do they work?" I asked. I knew it was a kind of talisman, but it was surprisingly expensive, considering my mother would be providing the main ingredients. The priestess explained that the bag would contain crystals and special roots and my mother's hair and nails. My mother would be able to squeeze it and meditate, but it would have only the power my mother chose to give it.

That's what I had been afraid of. For months my mother had seen specialists. She had to wear a mask in public in order to avoid common germs -- so she had stopped going out. My father drove her hundreds of miles for transfusions. At one point there was the possibility of a marrow transplant, but they worried her body was too weak to survive. She had stopped believing in things quite a while ago.

The day before Thanksgiving, in the tiny hospital where, more than 40 years earlier, she had given birth to me, I told my mother about the gris-gris bag.

"That's ridiculous," she said. She could still scold me.

"I only went because Dad asked me."

The next day, after a store-bought turkey in the kitchen in which she once resided, we returned. Mom asked how the meal was; it seemed the hospital food might have been better than what we had fed ourselves. Then she handed me a square of folded tissue paper, held together with a paper clip and a scrap of paper on which she had written "for Ken." Inside were finger nail and hair clippings.

"I asked the nurse to help me," she said. Did she hope that this might somehow help her, or was it because it was something my father had asked us both to do? I suspected the latter.

I returned to New Orleans, and for weeks drove with the clippings tucked safely into one of the dashboard storage cubbies of my car. Finally, I delivered them to the priestess and went about my daily life, in spite of daily reports of my mother's lack of progress. I canceled a Christmas trip because I was too ill to be in the same room with her. We all planned to be home for Easter, but by March she was in the hospital again. My sister called and I knew from her voice that it wasn't good. Mom had met with the doctors and decided to forgo any additional treatments. They expected her to go quickly.

It was several days before I could find a flight, taking three small planes. I tucked the gris-gris bag into my carry-on, although I felt my mother's decision made the bag's power moot. I didn't know if I would even mention it was there.

Mom was in and out of consciousness, sometimes sitting upright with a beautiful, lucid smile, while at other times she was confused and hallucinating. I spent the night in the chair next to her, or resting my head at her side, as if I really was her newborn child again. It was hard to know what to say, or what she would understand.

"Remember my dog Brando?" I asked. She said yes. "He says hello," I said. She smiled. Was she thinking that he actually was now talking, or perhaps wondering why I was claiming that he did? "Remember the gris-gris bag I was going to make?" She nodded, and I held it out in front of her. She was too weak to hold even something that small on her own. She smiled again and stared at the spot it occupied in space, like a child just beginning to wonder at the world. Everyone was surprised by how pretty it was, with a single crystal dangling like an earring from the tie that kept it closed. I told my dad to make sure it went with her when she was cremated.

In the hospice, over the next several nights, I slept in a room down the hall. I canceled my return flight, and somehow my mother continued to hold on. One afternoon she sat up and cried, "I don't understand why I'm still here!" and pulled the bed sheet over her head. We took turns soaking a sponge in Coke and lowering it to her mouth to suck on. It was the only food she wanted. At her request, I asked for more morphine, and the nurse said, "Is it for pain or is it to speed things along?"

"She's in pain," I said, understanding the code.

After five days, we decided that she might not go unless her children left first. When I said goodbye, she rose out of bed to hug me, and we both knew we would never see each other again.

"Are you driving?" she asked. She was worried that I might not get home safely.

"No," I told her. "I flew."

But she continued to cling to life. Was it Easter? The doctors asked if there was something she might be waiting for. Then it struck me -- my parents' 49th anniversary would arrive at the end of the week. When my father called that Thursday, just a few hours short of their anniversary, to tell me that she was gone, I was too stunned to speak. Her death, so long in coming, now seemed completely unexpected. My father continued speaking to me on the phone, but no words were coming on my end. Finally he said, "I'm going to go now. OK?"

364 days later, my father joined my mother.

We had never spoken about the gris-gris bag again. I hope it did go with her, purified by fire, rather than tossed aside by a nurse cleaning her room. But sometimes I wish I still had her gris-gris bag to hold onto.

Ken Foster is the author of a memoir, "The Dogs Who Found Me," a collection of stories, "The Kind I'm Likely to Get," and essays, "Dogs I Have Met."