Even in the grips of disease, she is beautiful. Her ashen black hair frames her narrow face like a wreath. In thirty years, I’ve rarely seen her with her hair down. She is a modest woman, neat and conscientious. She’s always worn her hair pulled away from her face, drawn into a bun or veiled with a square of linen or crocheted wool. When I was a child, I asked why she didn’t let down her hair. It was more beautiful than any other woman’s hair I’d seen. My friends’ mothers wore trendy hairstyles, streaked and colored, but they weren’t half as beautiful as my mother, if she’d only show it. But Mama told me her beauty was for God, and for Daddy, and for no one else. She said God saw her beauty in her heart. In the hospital bed, her beauty adorns her like flourishing ivy on a dying tree. Her lustrous hair falls over her jaundiced skin, and her thick black eyelashes lay against the sunken crescents under her eyes. Her drained lips are still full and shaped like the back of a lyre, though pulled taut by bodily suffering. “Mama,” I call again. “Listen to me. I want to tell you something very important.” Her eyelids part slightly, and I can see a flicker of the lamplight reflected on her glassy irises. Her fingers tense weakly around mine. Behind me, Daddy shifts his feet and breathes deeply. “Mama, I’m going to have a baby.” She inhales and opens her eyes enough to capture mine. “Kimmie....” Her lips form my name under a loose smile. The flicker in her eyes flashes as moisture floods over her lashes. My heart breaks with a thousand feelings, all reaching out and grabbing onto my mother who must stay with me, stay with me, stay with me, because it’s not time yet. I’m going to have a baby, Mama, and you must be here with me. This is the gift of life that is the right of every woman, the right of every daughter. Why not for us? You’ve loved me at the cost of everything else, and I’ve never abandoned you. Why is God punishing us? Why does He deny us this? “Kimmie,” she says, pulling me to her. It must take all her strength to raise her arm to encircle me. I’m sobbing against her chest, and I can hear the wet, raspy static of her lungs filling and emptying with less air than she needs. “Mama, don’t leave me, don’t leave me,” I say. And she begins to speak to me in a language I haven’t heard since I was small enough to lie in her lap and love lullabies. “`A`ole no au e `ike ana lâ. Kekahi mea nui aku no ke keiki, ke kâlai nei `o Makua. Ke aloha nui mamua o ka`u .”