Spring is here again.

Four years ago at this time, I sat by my ailing mother's bedside and told her that she was free to go. That she could just let go. That it was time to meet her favorite relatives and her mother and father on the other side of The River.

The ventilator attached crudely to my mother's mouth hissed and clicked, puncturing the silence in this small and cluttered hospital room. I had lowered my voice to a whisper as I told her things I had never said to her before: "I love you...Thank you for being a great mom...I hope to be as strong as you someday," each short phrase followed by an awkward silence. I whispered because I was embarrassed to say these things even though she was already brain dead. We don't readily heap words of adoration on family, dead of alive, in my culture. I was also afraid that anybody in this life-affirming Christian hospital who heard me would think of me as pure evil, a breacher of a silent contract when I said, "Goodbye Mom, it's time to go."

Just a few weeks earlier, my mother appeared to be responding well to the treatment. Her stomach cancer, while aggressive, seemed to have stalled. Color returned to her gaunt cheeks and she was excited about the new cellphone I had bought her so we could text message each other.

But we all knew her odds — one in a million, her doctor told us. We understood that this was a temporal moment of peace before her final struggle. We all tacitly agreed that we would only speak in terms of "when" she recovers and not "if." My mother was an eternal optimist and hope was all she had. One time she asked the doctor how soon he thought she could leave the hospital. Without any hesitation, he said to her that she should be "turning the corner" in spring. I knew exactly what he meant. What he didn't tell her was where that corner turned on to. Nobody, including myself, had the courage to level with her.