Here I sit in a hotel room, miles and miles away from home. Just minutes from here, my birth mother lies on a special compression airbed to prevent bed sores.  It's what many bed ridden, terminally ill patients are using these days.  I have had two glasses of wine to somehow numb the... what?  What is it that I feel?  Privileged, because I have been called out here to see to her final days. Overwhelmed, because I have been called out here to see to her final wishes.  Confused, because I have been called out here to see to my duty as a daughter.  My search on the internet for some wisdom and advice about how to handle the complications that come from meeting your birth family have come up with pages and pages of how to find them.  Got that one down.  But no one navigates you through the weirdness and emotional disconnect. There are no words of validation or comfort for when a daughter has to watch her birth mother die.  What, my dear internet friends, do I do with the thoughts of feeling like I just want to let this one go but am driven by an ancestral, almost primal instinct to answer the call of a daughter.  However disconnected.  However withdrawn. However broken hearted over what never was and what could've been.  Because as deeply as my heart wanted to connect to my mother, my head or rather, my armor, could not allow a bond which should have happened already.  At birth.  How do I soften my heart long enough to give her the peace she needs to grab hold of the children she kept, to forgive the mother who made her give me up, to let go of this broken world and receive the grace and forgiveness offered to her by the One and Only Lord of Lords?  How, my world wide web world, do I say to the woman who let me go, to let me go again and go, to the One who has her future in an eternity free of wrenching decisions or tears or wickedness?  And then turn, to look into the eyes, eyes that I know like I know the eyes in mirror, eyes of my brothers, and explain this strange love I have for her, for them.  How do I give them the peace to let go of a mother so damaged by the past, so brutalized by evil and sin and selfishness, so overcome by her own shame, but still sacrificing everything for them?  A mother who let me go and kept them.  Who, made me favorite, in an effort to atone. But still, not the one whom she kept.  How, do I convey the reality of the blessedness of being kept?  And help these, my handsome young brothers, to step into the right that is theirs to claim as sons, as heirs, as kept.  For, I do not need to have been kept but really, I need to be let go.