I like hiking in the mountains of Arizona. They’re so much more … well, mountainous, than anything we have in Texas, which after all doesn’t have mountains, unless you count Big Bend National Park. And Big Bend certainly does count for something: it’s got Emory Peak, in the Chisos Mountains, elevation 7,832 feet. The most elevated thing near Houston, where I live, is the Sam Houston Ship Channel Bridge, which is part of Beltway 8, to the east of the city. It has a clearance of 175 feet — more than I care to think about when actually driving over it, but not much in terms of a hike. Besides, the traffic on Beltway 8 leaves little room for the would-be hiker.

Mount Wilson is my favorite. It’s relatively small (elevation just 5,446 feet), and you can make it to the top in two hours if you push it, but the views are spectacular, and it has a special significance for me. Mount Wilson is just north of Sedona (we’re talking Arizona now), along Route 89A that cuts through Oak Creek Canyon. Once through the canyon, from Route 89A you can jump on I-17 and head north toward Flagstaff (or south, away from it, if that’s your pleasure). But I usually go north, through Flagstaff and just beyond, to my second favorite Arizona mountain, Humphrey’s Peak, which is the highest of the San Francisco Peaks, a group of extinct volcanos, and at its top it’s 12,633 feet. For some reason, gnats swarm there, right at the top, and if you plan on eating a bite or two to prep yourself for the hike down, you need to be careful when opening your mouth or you’ll get more protein than you bargained for.

And let’s not forget the Grand Canyon. Technically, of course, it’s not a mountain, but once you get to the bottom of Bright Angel Trail, for example, you’re looking at a climb back out of 6,093 feet. The round-trip trek is 16 miles. Burros are available (for a price, of course). They’re sure-footed animals, and you can ride them down and back up, if that’s your preference. Signs posted at the trail head there warn visitors not to attempt a round-trip hike in one day. (Lodging is available at the bottom, in the inner gorge, at a place called Phantom Ranch.) Never one to take signs too literally, I hiked the Bright Angel Trail, down and back up, in roughly 5.5 hours. Wearing ankle weights. And a backpack loaded with water. But I was younger then, much younger, and I was using the hike as training for my first marathon, which would be about four months later, sometime in January, in Houston.

I doubt I would have hiked those places often if my parents hadn’t moved to Arizona after they retired. They were Snowbirds for a while, that peculiar species of seniors traveling back and forth between north and south to avoid the extremes of warm and cold climates. Later, when the back and forth between Washington State and Arizona became more of a burden than the summer heat of Sun City (on the outskirts of Phoenix), they stayed put pretty much year-round.

During those times when I visited my parents — not often enough, I think, looking back on it now — I would occasionally make the trip north of Phoenix for a hike. Sometimes it was a day trip, sometimes it was longer. However long it was, it never seemed long enough. Call me boring or unimaginative, but I think I could hike Mount Wilson every day for an entire summer and still not tire of it. (Humphrey’s Peak and the Grand Canyon would be another story; while I wouldn’t tire of hiking them, I would definitely be tired.) I suppose it’s the quiet there that I enjoy most, the solace that I feel when I’m surrounded by rocks and trees and plant life and a world that largely just ignores me. I usually hike alone — I follow advice about hiking as closely as I read signs — but I’ve hiked Mount Wilson with my sons a few times too. That’s always been great fun. Well, maybe not the first time. They were young then and did a lot of bitching and moaning on the way up. I don’t blame them — in spots, especially just before you reach the alligator trees (Alligator Juniper, or Juniperus deppeana, if you’re so inclined), the switchbacks come hard and steep — and my boys’ legs were shorter than mine back then.

You see interesting stuff along the way, no matter if it’s Mount Wilson or Humphrey’s Peak or the Grand Canyon. I can’t identify most it. Oh, I recognize the alligator trees, and I know a cairn when I spot one, but I don’t really know a thing about rocks or trees or plant life. I don’t know what to call them, except “that rock” or “that tree over there,” “the plant between that rock and that tree over there.” While functional enough, I guess, my vocabulary lacks a certain kind of precision. In truth, it lacks just about every kind of precision. But it’s too late in the game and I’m not going to learn that stuff know. Besides, my lack of precision doesn’t diminish my appreciation, an appreciation that would be difficult to put into words even if I did know the precise terms. I compensate, I suppose, by looking for metaphors. And while things like alligator trees might be specific to certain regions, like the southwestern United States, metaphors grow just about anywhere and everywhere. So that’s what I look for, sometimes, when I’m hiking. I remember one time in particular when I spotted one of them along the trail.

It was a rock — don’t ask me what kind — and fairly large, if I remember correctly. But the size of the rock wasn’t important. What was important was what I saw growing out of the center of the rock, right through the heart. (I think geologists might wince at the use of that word, “heart.”) A single blade or shoot of something green. I wondered if the plant — I have to assume it was a plant, it was too small to be a tree, and I’d already identified the rock, which left only “plant” from among my nature vocabulary — anyway, I wondered if this plant had worked its way through an existing crack in the rock, had taken the way of least resistance, so to speak, and had grown, as part of its instinctive search for sunlight, I suppose, through the convenient split in the rock and on out the top, where it could flourish. That was certainly one possibility, I thought to myself. But then it seemed to me, as I looked again at the rock — and a little more closely this time, more at the level where metaphors tend to reside — that the crack wasn’t there before the single blade or shoot of something green, but rather came about as the result of said blade or said shoot having traveled through the stone (Is there a difference between a rock and a stone?), having pushed its way through the heart of the stone, thus forming the crack as it inched along, instinctively, as I’ve suggested, toward the sun. I don’t know if that’s even possible, that a blade of grass or a single shoot of a plant can do that, grow through a rock. It might be bad science, but it’s not a bad metaphor. It set me to thinking about things like strength and fortitude and purpose and direction, the kind of strength and fortitude and purpose and direction that would be necessary to do something like grow right through a rock. I wondered what it would take to do that. Whatever it might take, I felt then as if I didn’t have it, and I doubt I have it now.

But perhaps my mother did. It could be that my mother had that kind of strength and fortitude and purpose and direction. When she celebrated her 80th birthday, she was fit as a fiddle (she liked expressions like that, “fit as a fiddle”). My sister and I were there, as were many of my mother’s friends from her neighborhood in Sun City. It was a great day for her, and she was happy and healthy and ate cake. (We all did.) Three short weeks later, the party was over: She suffered an aneurysm and had to undergo emergency surgery.

It was early evening, just before 7:00, and raining in Houston, and I was about to leave my apartment to walk over to the theater where we were rehearsing for a production of Lanford Wilson’s Burn This. I played the part of Pale, a fellow with substantial emotional baggage and a mouth to match. I loved working on this play, and I was looking forward to rehearsal. Before I made it out the door, the phone rang. It was a surgeon calling, some surgeon from a hospital in Sun City. He explained to me — briefly, because time was of the essence, every minute counted — that my mom had suffered an aneurysm, fortunately while in the hospital under observation for something else, something minor, and now she was being wheeled into the operating room on a gurney, right then, at that very moment. The odds of her surviving the operation, the surgeon said, were three in one hundred. Three in one hundred. The doctor then handed her the phone. We shared a few sentences, my mom and I. I said something to her, maybe “be strong,” “don’t worry,” something useless like that. Probably “I love you” and “I’m on my way.” And then I ran through the rain, which helped hide my tears, ran to the theater so that I could explain to the cast and director what had happened and tell them that I had to leave, immediately, had to book a flight and get from Houston to Phoenix as quickly as possible.

Turns out, my mom was one of those three in one hundred. After five days in a coma, she woke up. Or rather, the person lying in the hospital bed with my mother’s name on her wristband woke up. Something inside her had shifted, like the ground after an earthquake. She wasn’t the same as before, and she never was quite herself again after that. For the surgery, her body had been wrapped in ice and the temperature brought down low and fast, but still, her brain had been without oxygen for roughly twelve minutes. I have no idea what she experienced during those twelve minutes, or during the surgery, or during the five days in a coma, days I spent at her bedside in the ICU, trading shifts with my sister. We both noticed it, the look of someone familiarly strange. When she spoke, the phrases she used weren’t those that we were used to hearing. Subtle differences, but my sister and I noticed. Did my mother notice too? If she did, she never let on. In some respects, she was her old self and she showed a good sense of humor, although sometimes unintentionally. Like when she mistook a yellow scouring pad for a piece of lemon pie. Probably starved after five days in a coma, my mom spotted something on the sink in her hospital room. It was, as I said, a yellow scouring pad, with a green base, and it was wrapped in plastic. That’s what it looked like to me and I suppose everyone else. My mom pointed to it and asked “Is that pie?” It was an unlikely question. Somewhat like me finding plants inside of a rock on a mountain, my mom had found pie on a sink in a hospital. But then, she always did like pie, and she was good at baking them too. My sister and I laughed, when my mom asked about that “pie,” we laughed just a bit too hysterically, I think. Later, I gave my sister the lemon-yellow scouring pad to keep in her freezer, just in case she (my sister) should ever get hungry.

My mother’s death was inevitable and, as such things go, natural. She knew it was coming before any of us did. My sister called one day in early June, more than a year after the surgery. “Rick,” she said, “You have to come now. Mom says it’s time.” Nothing more needed to be said. What else could it be time for? I was on the next possible flight from Houston to Phoenix, and I arrived there, at the hospice, at my mother’s side, around 2:00 in the afternoon. She wasn’t what I would call lucid, but she was conscious and awake. She saw me approach her bed. She spoke my name. She smiled. And by 2:30, she had slipped into unconsciousness. She never woke up again.

For many hours, my mom lay there, eyes closed, unconscious, in one harm holding a stuffed dog I had given her for Christmas a few years earlier, a dog that reminded her of my own white Maltese puppy that she so dearly loved. I used to bring my dog along whenever I visited, not only when she lived at home, in good health, but also in the hospice. All the patients there loved him too. Who wouldn’t? On this trip, though, Tucker, my dog, had to stay at home in Houston, but the stuffed dog stood in for him and remained there with my mom, in her arms, all the way to the end.

The nurses at the hospice where my mother spent her last months and days were good people, professional and accommodating and understanding. What my mom was going through, what all of us were going through, was a first-time experience for us, but the nurses had been witnesses to death and grieving many times before. The experience hadn’t made them callous, and for that I am grateful. Because they knew each of their patients (there weren’t all that many), they also felt a genuine sense of loss every time someone under their care passed away. As my mother lay in a coma that evening, her breathing became increasingly difficult. Her lungs filled with fluid, a sign of pending cardiopulmonary failure. The nurse on shift took us aside and indicated, as gently as these things can be indicated, that we could probably expect her to live for about another two hours.

My mother was not a large woman, and in her final days she was, as you can imagine, weak and frail. And yet, despite the prognosis of the nurse, my mother refused to stop breathing. We waited two hours. We waited four hours. We waited 10 hours and more. I came to understand the gruesome meaning of death rattle.  Finally, around 2:30 in the morning, I said to my sister and her husband, “Maybe she’d rather not have us here when she goes. Let’s go home and get some rest.” They agreed, and we went back to spend what was left of the night at my mother’s small house, just minutes from the hospice. Before we left, I asked the staff — rather firmly, I’m afraid (my nerves were on edge) — to notify us immediately of any changes. It was a silly thing to ask; of course that’s what they would do. It was simply one of those helpless gestures on my part, the kind of helpless gesture you make when you’re standing there, feeling helpless, watching your mother die.

Exhaustion took over. Despite the sudden and heavy sleep, I jolted from my bed. It was dark outside. The clock read 5:45 in the morning. It wasn’t the alarm that had jarred me from my sleep; I had set the alarm for 6:00. Instead, it was the sound of my mom’s voice, loud and clear, speaking my name, just once, but with such presence that I thought she had spoken directly in my ear, or maybe had found a way inside my head. I reached for the phone. “What’s going on there?” I asked the nurse on duty at the hospice. “Is everything okay?” My mother, I was told, had passed away just moments before.

I’ve hiked my favorite place, Mount Wilson, a few times again since then. As usual, among all those rocks and trees and plants and nobody else around, there’s plenty of space and plenty of time to think about things. And on occasion I would think of my mom, about her long life and her long death, about her last word before she lost consciousness, and about her last word, also my name, that startled me from my sleep. And it seemed to me then, somewhere there along the trail, that I could finally understand the sound of her voice as she spoke my name. I could place it now, I knew what it was. It was the sound of strength and fortitude and purpose and direction, the sound of a single blade of grass, or a shoot of something green, the sound of love growing through rock, right through the heart.