Pictured is columnist Dmae Roberts as a child (left) with her mother, Chu-Yin Lo Roberts, and brother.

I didn’t realize the last Thanksgiving I spent with my mom would actually be the very last. We never know about "the last time" until it has already passed.

Ma’s been gone 10 years now. When she had a recurrence of breast cancer, I spent three years commuting back and forth from Portland to Eugene every three or four days to help take care of her. I oversaw the household, shopped, cooked, and cleaned while trying to get my work done on a laptop computer on her kitchen table.

At night we would watch romantic comedy movies. Once in a while, ma would point out someone being too silly and I’d agree. For a woman who had no formal education and didn’t read English, she had quite the discerning eye. She remarked on stupid plotlines or rolled her eyes at sappy dialogue and got teary during poignant moments.

Before my mother became sick, we never had the patience with one another to sit quietly together. The arguments always got in the way, especially during the holidays.

Our movie marathons were a fun quiet time together. We never had that after I became a teen and started to rebel. It continued through adulthood. It took her illness for us to finally find a midpoint and enjoy each other’s company.

Before then, she’d try to hook me into her Taiwanese musical soap operas. They were badly recorded video copies of costumed dramas in which the Monkey King and beautiful princesses in gowns with long, flowing sleeves fought battles against evil emperors. I loved watching them for about 10 minutes, before the dreadful singing and clanging of instruments started. My Oklahoman father used to call it kwangkwang — a Taiwanese slang word for any loud noise.

When I became my mom’s caregiver, I rented movies and watched them on a little television in the spare bedroom where I slept. One day I was in the middle of The Green Mile when ma peeked in.

"What are you doing?" she asked.

"I’m watching this movie about a convict who heals people …" She sat down on the bed next to me, fascinated as I explained the plot. At one point, the Michael Duncan Clark character put his hands on a dying Patricia Clarkson and took her cancer away. We cried together when we saw that. That’s when our movie marathons began.

Caregiving is full of ups and downs. You have bad weeks, but you find joy in getting closer to the loved one who is ill. That last Thanksgiving, we had hope.

After two bouts of pneumonia while fighting her breast cancer, ma ended up in a hospice program. At one point, during the summer that was to be her last summer, she was frustrated with her slow recovery. We figured out during her hospitalization that she’d had a minor stroke, which was why one side of her mouth didn’t quite work. She started crying in frustration because she couldn’t drink a glass of water without some of it spilling out.

I said to her, "Ma, people can live a longer time with cancer, but you need to decide if you want to live."

She looked in my direction, quietly studying me, and said, "I want to live."

"Then you will," I said.

After she "graduated" from the hospice program, she was happy to move about the house, go shopping once a week, and cook simple meals with the assistance of my brother or me.

That Thanksgiving, my husband spent the holiday with his elderly parents and I was with my mom and brother. After years of arguing about my not eating meat, my mother embraced her Buddhist religion and became a vegetarian. That thrilled me to no end, so I attempted to cook a Tofurky without reading the directions. Ma wanted me to baste it like she did when she roasted a turkey every Thanksgiving eve. I ended up cooking it way too long, making it a bit tough and chewy.

Today during the holidays, my hubby follows the directions on the Tofurky package and it turns out moist and delicious. But that Thanksgiving, my mom and I laughed at how hard it was to chew, so we dined instead on mashed potatoes, veggies, and store-bought pumpkin pie. Afterward, we had another of our silly romantic movie marathons.

That was to be our last Thanksgiving meal together. We didn’t know it was the last. We only thought about hope and living as long as possible before the inevitable end. That came after the oncologist told us on one of our weekly visits that there was no need to return. Ma died five months later in May. On our final Thanksgiving, though, we had one good holiday that made up for the difficult ones in the past.