I was afraid my mother would collapse on the way to the car, but she insisted on walking without help.

"I'm not an invalid. I'm not a cripple. It's just my stupid heart," she said, and looked across the street to be sure the neighbors weren't watching. "Bring my bag and my pillow. You know I can't sleep on those hospital pillows."

We were both calm. We'd been through this before, many times. After the first moments of crisis, everything started to feel like a drill, like something we did in the event of an emergency.

"Business as usual," my mother would say to the doctor who met us at the emergency room. "Just be sure I don't die in here. I don't like all these white walls. They give me the creeps."

For years, three things broke up the white on my parents' walls at home -- two plastic-framed paintings and a crucifix the size of a ham.

The paintings had been on sale at Woolworth's.

"A steal," my mother said. "It's not every day you can get great art at that price."

"Stupidest damn things I've ever seen," my father said. "My dog can do better than that."

The paintings were a matched set -- two big-eyed moppets dressed as harlequins. One wore pink tights, the other blue. They were sad little girls with mandolins. They had heads like buoys and jellybean feet, and their eyes were black and glossy, as if they'd lived long and seen every sorrow in the world and weren't little girls at all.

As for the crucifix, it hung over my parents' bed. It wasn't what it appeared to be, either.

One day, when my mother took it down to dust, the top was pushed back. The crucifix, it turned out, was actually a hollow box. Inside was a bottle of holy water, rosary beads, a vial of oil, two candles, and a prayer book.

A Last Rites kit, my mother explained.

"In case the priest doesn't make it in time," she said as she dusted Jesus' nooks and crannies with a Q-tip. Jesus looked like a bronze dragonfly without wings. He seemed to be shrugging.

"It's good to be prepared," my mother said. "Do you know how many people die in their sleep? Just up and go, just like that?"

My grandmother, my father's mother, died before I was born. She had a bad heart and died in her sleep while my mother sat next to her in a chair. One minute my grandmother was breathing. Then she wasn't. People call this peaceful.

"I want to go like that," both my parents would say.

The Last Rites kit had been a gift. My grandmother, my mother's mother, gave it to my parents on their wedding day. She thought this was a good and practical thing. My mother had been sick since birth, and would, years later, have the distinction of being the only person in her family, the only person I knew of, period, to receive Last Rites four times.

The Catholic Church doesn't call them Last Rites any more, for the same reasons that, when I was a flight attendant, we weren't allowed to use the word turbulence when we talked to passengers.

"Turbulence scares people," my flight-attendant trainer told me. "We say rough air."

Before they were called Anointing of the Sick, Last Rites were the final steps before death. This was serious, something most people didn't live to tell about, and so my mother was proud that she'd been almost routinely exceptional. She'd had her first round when she was 8 or 9 -- heart problems, anemia.

"They didn't know what was wrong with me," my mother said. "But they were sure I wouldn't make it through the night."

Someone called the priest, who prayed and poured oil on her forehead and consoled her parents, who'd already picked out a burial plot.

Then my mother got better.

Ten years later, she'd get a visit from a priest again -- this time for tuberculosis.

She'd picked it up during her first year of nursing school. She was in isolation. The priest came. The family wept. My mother got better.

And so, when my parents were married, my grandmother thought the crucifix would be the perfect gift, given my mother's habits and all. My grandmother even gave a speech at the reception.

"I just want you to know," she said, and raised a glass to my father. "Enjoy her while you can. She won't live long."

Although my mother had never used the kit that came with the crucifix, she was anointed two more times, both in a hospital, both because of heart attacks -- one in the mid-1980s, another in the early 1990s. These two times, the rites were administered by the same priest. He'd later joke with her.

"You again?" he'd say. "You think I'm not working hard enough?"

"I'm like a cat," my mother would say. "Five lives to go, Father."

All of this had made my mother seem indestructible, even on the day she refused the ambulance, even when I ran red lights and we made it to the hospital in minutes.

But although we were what hospital workers call cool customers, my mother had started to carry a living will in her purse. My hand shook when I filled out her paperwork.

The great Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet once wrote that we believe in mortality, just not for ourselves or those we love.

My father died at home, in a spare bedroom that the hospice nurses had set up like a hospital room. To give my father something to look at, my mother hung a calendar on the wall. It had pictures of teddy bears dressed in prom gowns on it. It was ridiculous, but better than the crucifix or a blank white wall, and my father liked to count the days.

I'd stayed in the room with him and slept there on the love seat. I knew my father was afraid to die because he'd told me so, and even though I couldn't do anything about death, I didn't want him to be alone while he waited for it.

I'd tried not to cry in front of him, but one day, when he was very sick and moving in and out of consciousness, I couldn't help it. I thought he wouldn't notice and that, at this point, he wouldn't mind much, and so I sat in a corner of the room and wept. I didn't try to stop it. I must have been making a horrible fuss because my father woke up. He turned his head to me and his eyes seemed bright and lucid, no trace of morphine. He looked at me and smiled and said, "Don't cry, honey. I'm going to be around."

And in that moment, I was a child again and he was my father and I believed him.

That was the last conscious thing my father said to me. He died two weeks later.

The adult in me, the person who'd been giving my father his medications, who'd made decisions about his care and tried to buffer my mother from stress and grief, expected this. The child in me, who lay awake at night and listened to her father breathe, expected him to keep his word.

Hikmet said we must live so that, even at 70, we'll plant olive trees. Not for our children or our grandchildren, but because we believe we will live to eat the olives. This, he knew, is how we go on.

"I'm fine," my mother said as she stretched out on the gurney and waited for more blankets and a glass of ginger ale.

The heart monitor beeped and thrummed, steady and sure.

She's fine, I thought. We're going to be fine.