"Light a cigarette for me and put it between my fingers," rasped the emaciated form in the nursing home bed.

"But Mother, you know you can't smoke," I countered in surprise.

"Honey, when I see that cigarette burning, I know I'm still alive," she croaked wryly.

I did as she asked and watched as the hand holding the cigarette fell across her deformed chest. She studied the curling smoke for a moment, smiled almost contentedly, and closed her eyes. I rescued the cigarette from her slackened grip and extinguished it in the bedside ashtray. Barely two hours later she was dead. She was 53 years old.

My mother never knew Larry Bird, who was growing up in a town 20 miles west. She never knew Mohammed Ali who was Cassius Clay to her in a city 25 miles southeast. She never knew her only grandson, nor her second granddaughter. Most precious to her were the seventeen months she spent with her first granddaughter. My mother died of cancer when I was thirty-two.

As I turned from her bedside to the rest of my life, I knew we had just played a serious game of Tag and I was IT.