1.

All of us remember what Mother’s Day was like before we became sterile: flowers and candy for living mothers and tears for dead ones and anger at bad ones, and women who couldn’t be mothers or who’d lost children marinating in grief, and nobody really profiting from any of it except Hallmark and the restaurants and florists. We remember the arguments on Facebook and Twitter about Mother’s Day, people who loved the sentimentality angrily protesting the people who loathed it, sensitive souls tactfully trying to embrace every possible category of mother or non-mother while insensitive souls sneered at the whole thing, said you were a sucker to buy those roses or that box of See’s and everybody’s mother dies, boo-hoo, get over it. All those photos on Facebook: we remember them, the living mothers and dead mothers and non-mothers and never-wanted-to-be-mothers, the Childless by Choice complaining about being second-class citizens, suspect in the suburbs, even if that extra income—all the money you saved by not having to pay for birthing classes and nannies and Graco strollers and preschool-more-expensive-than-Harvard—made your life a lot more comfortable.

Back then, the marketers used to say that Mother’s Day was for everybody, because everybody had a mother, even if everyone wasn’t a mother. Now Mother’s Day is for everybody because nobody’s a mother, not anymore and never again, and that’s just as well, really, because the air’s crap and there isn’t much water either and the crops have gone blooie and non-human species are dying out faster than you can say “end of life as we know it,” and even if anyone could have kids, who the hell wants to raise them in a world without polar bears or penguins or elephants? As usual, only the cockroaches are expected to outlive us, and they don’t make for charming nature documentaries.

These days, Mother’s Day is a solemn occasion. All the ribbons are black. All the flowers would be funeral lilies if we could find them. All the restaurants have closed because there isn’t enough food. Most of us don’t even have electricity anymore, so the old books and photos are newly precious: the ones our great-grandmothers took for granted, paper and ink, the only games in town before the internet, which used to bring us more news than we could stand almost instantaneously and now operates only in unpredictable patches for the few people with the resources to access it.

We’re all students of history now, however we can learn about it. We read about the triumphs and accomplishments of the human spirit—art, moon landings, technological and scientific innovation—and we read about its worst atrocities: Hiroshima, Auschwitz, the Killing Fields. Now we all know what the Hallmark industrial complex used to try to make us forget: that Mother’s Day began not as a sentimental festival of flowers and chocolate, but as an antiwar protest, an alliance of mothers against the forces sending their sons to war, sending their children to fight and die. The first Mother’s Day honored the grief of mothers.

Now, Mother’s Day honors the grief of children. All of our mothers, even the young ones, are getting older. Mothers are dying out the way the polar bears did, the common housecat, the Everglades alligator. It used to be, when your parents died, you knew that your generation was up next, but at least your kids would succeed you. When the last mother dies now, the people who survive her will be the last people on the planet. When they die, there will be no more wars, no more mass murder, no more hateful internet memes. There will also be no paintings or symphonies or novels. The cockroaches will inherit the Earth.

We have terrible dreams. All of us, whether we have wombs or not, dream of being pregnant, dream of feeling life stir within us and then grow. In these dreams, we dream of giving birth to children who cry and crawl and walk, who will outlive us, who will create new paintings and symphonies and novels. And then we wake to empty bellies: empty of food, empty of embryos.

2.

And here we are, at the day we’ve dreaded: the Mother’s Day honoring the last living mother, or at least the last living mother in any of the communities we know about, the outposts we can reach. There may be others somewhere else. We have to hope so, although they’ll die too, and no one’s heard of a human infant being born anywhere, not for decades now.

She’s the last mother in this chunk of North America. This day is hers.

She won’t make it to next year. She’s in her seventies, and three months ago she was diagnosed with one of the new cancers at one of the very few places left that can do such work—she was lucky to live close to there—and she didn’t want treatment, only comfort care. She may have three months left. She may have less than that. Already she seems hollowed out, distant, a fragile crystal flute played by the wind. She sits piled on soft cushions, the brightest we could find, on the steps of what used to be the state capitol building here in Nevada.

Summoned by courier and word of mouth, by smoke signal and semaphore and the odd electronic message, people have traveled for weeks to see her, walking the ruins of Highway 80 across the Great Basin from the East and the Sierra Nevada from the West, hiking the remains of Highway 395 from Arizona in the south and Oregon in the North, foraging for whatever food and water they could find.

Her name is Gwynnie Abernathy. The crowd stares at her in reverence; some people kneel, awestruck. Gwynnie, who used to work in a grocery store minding a slot machine—getting people change, smoking whenever she had a break, going home to watch bad movies on cable—stares back in bewilderment. On either side of her, sign-language interpreters stand on raised platforms so they can be seen by the crowd. We use the People’s Microphone in situations like this, a few words chanted by those standing near so everyone can hear them—a fossil from when we staged occupations and chanted manifestos, a relic from the time when we still hoped to transform society into a going concern—but that’s deucedly slow, and we’re all getting older, and many of us are hard of hearing. We’ve learned sign language to fill in the gaps.

The crowd stares at Gwynnie. Gwynnie stares at the crowd. “Tell us about being a mother!” someone calls out, longingly.

“Are your children here?” asks someone else. “They should be on the steps with you!”

“How did you feel when you learned you were pregnant?”

“What was it like to give birth?”

“What’s the most important thing your children taught you?”

We’re looking for wisdom and transcendence. We’re looking for stirring inspiration. But that would be a lot for any mother to produce, and while there have been mothers in the world who could do it, Gwynnie Abernathy is not one of them. Her fingers curl; she hugs herself. She whispers to the attendant standing next to her, who calls out—in a chant taken up by the People’s Mic—“I want a cigarette. Anybody got a cigarette?”

No one has a cigarette. Someone offers two small carrots, themselves vanishingly rare and infinitely precious, and Gwynnie gnaws on one before beginning her story.

She was sixteen the first time she got pregnant. She didn’t know who the father was. It could have been her boyfriend, a sweet twenty-year-old who worked at a Big Box Store, or her mother’s latest boyfriend, who considered young Gwynnie a tasty morsel. Either way, she was in no position to raise a child, and took steps to see that she wouldn’t.

A shiver goes through the crowd. We remember those days, and we still believe that girls and women had the right to choose then, but in the current landscape, such a thing seems unimaginable. All that freedom. The luxury of saying no to children because you knew there’d be more, there’d always be more; there were so many on the planet then, so many mothers and babies, that not having children often seemed like an enlightened political act, a prudent act of self-restraint and common sense. And would we have wanted sixteen-year-old Gwynnie to have that baby, back then? Would we have considered her a good candidate for motherhood? No, of course not. We’d have counseled her to do just what she did, if we could go back.

That was the first time she got pregnant. The second time was five years later, when she was twenty-one, after a date that ended in darkness in the back of a car. She figured the guy drugged her: she came to dumped on the sidewalk, a cop shaking her, sticky warmth between her legs. She never remembered what had happened; she didn’t want to. But her period didn’t come, and didn’t come, and she was dithering about what to do, dreading it, when her body decided the matter for her and miscarried, a flood of blood and pain that took her to the ER and a D&C, and post-surgical complications, and three days on antibiotics in a hospital bed.

The crowd around the capital steps has quieted. No one’s cheering. The gazes are no longer reverent. Most people are no longer looking at Gwynnie; they’re looking at the ground. Some weep. This is not the story we came here for, but still Gwynnie is the Last Living Mother, and so we wait to hear the end of her tale. Surely it will become happier.

Gwynnie takes another bite of her carrot, and continues with her story. The third time she was pregnant was when she was thirty-six. This pregnancy she wanted and welcomed; she and her husband, a trucker who’d die fifteen years later after a heart attack, had been trying to have a baby and had almost given up. The doctor said it was a high-risk pregnancy because of Gwynnie’s age, but Gwynnie and Joe were in a euphoric haze. This was their miracle baby, their jewel, the reward for every previous bit of suffering.

Their little girl, Serenity, was perfect: ten fingers and ten toes, bright and inquisitive, funny and sensitive. She adored her parents. They adored her. As she grew, she delighted in animals, figure skating, baton twirling, and baking cupcakes. In high school, she displayed a gift for math and science. “Who knows where that came from?” Gwynnie said. “Not from us.”

When Joe died, their daughter was Gwynnie’s great comfort, “my lifeline.” Serenity attended virtual college on a scholarship—by then, the pandemics sweeping the globe every year had done away with in-person education—and had begun an online master’s in Pharmaceutical Sciences when she caught one of the ancient viruses released by the permafrost.

“The hospital didn’t have room for her,” Gwynnie said, taking the last bite of carrot. “They wouldn’t have been able to help even if they had: no meds for it. Her fever went up to 105. I was out of my mind, trying to keep her comfortable with ice and fans and anything I could, but it wasn’t much cooler than 105 outside, either. I’d been tending her I don’t know how long and I finally had to sleep, and when I woke up she was gone.”

By the time Serenity died, all of us knew that the world was ending. “I was glad she died before I did,” Gwynnie tells the crowd. “I mean, once I got over wishing I’d died instead. Still don’t know where she got it, or how I didn’t. But I’d worried about what her life would look like, with everything getting so horrible, and then I didn’t have to.

“And now, well, you know, I’m glad I’m dying myself. I’m glad I won’t have to go through all that. I’m sorry for you lot.”

And with that, Gwynnie’s done. None of us have the heart to ask her what it felt like to be pregnant, what foods she’d craved—pickles or potato chips or ice cream—what thrill she’d felt looking at sonograms and books of baby names. Someone walks up the Capital steps to hand her a bouquet of fake flowers made from tattered pieces of trash, non-biodegradable plastic, and she smiles and takes them and waves, and then someone else brings her a bit of lunch and the rest of us scatter into clumps to eat our own meals, or share what we have: old canned stuff, ancient peanut butter, pine nuts (the pine cones are probably diseased now, but what difference does that make?), Hostess cupcakes which are of course still good because they have a shelf life of 50,000 years.

We still have plenty of Hostess cupcakes. Even now, we don’t want to live on sugar, and we haven’t been able to eat all of them. We’ll have to leave some for the cockroaches, who—being infinitely clever and having all the time in the world—will learn to infiltrate the non-biodegradable shrinkwrap covering the cupcakes and will feast on frosting and will lay mutant egg sacs producing offspring with opposable thumbs who’ll go on to discover fire and the wheel, again, and who in another few millennia will probably have invented their own internet and their own Hostess cupcakes and their own version of ecological catastrophe, and will be where we are now, gathered around the last female cockroach ever to have laid an egg sac.

But the cockroaches can tell their own story. Back to ours.

3.

Gwynnie Abernathy died a few weeks after that Mother’s Day. Some of us, heartsick and doomed, simply stopped celebrating it then: wiped the day off the calendar and out of our memories, knowing that all of us were next, that we were the last generation. Unplanned obsolescence. What was left of the world would not miss us, we knew. The cockroaches and their fellow survivors would go merrily on, feasting on our remains. Our demise would simply make more room for them, and that was as it should be.

Back when people’s survivors included children, back when humanity was still a continuous chain rather than a short-term, failed experiment, the dying used to be counseled to conduct life reviews, to think back over their joys and accomplishments, losses and sorrows, to think back on what had been even as they looked ahead to what might be, for who knows what comes next?

There used to be stories of dead people waiting to greet the newly-not-alive, and some of us cling to those stories, of course, carrying them like precious stones in our pockets, polishing them with trembling fingers. When we die, all the mothers will be there to greet us. Humanity will go forward in whatever that new dimension is. Maybe we’ll have learned something.

Those of us who believe those stories take great comfort in them.

Many of us don’t believe them. Some of us think we will simply return to the soil to be incorporated into whatever form of life comes next. Being food for cockroaches isn’t the worst thing to happen; there will still be life, and we’ll still have contributed to it. Some of us cling desperately to fantasies of rescue: alien spacecraft swooping down to transport the last few survivors to new and wonderful worlds where they’ll begin again, reconstructing the internet and the Superbowl and Hostess cupcakes, merrily destroying whatever non-human species are thriving in that new place, because really, have we learned anything, even now? Have we acquired wisdom, or simply regret?

But most of us, knowing that we cannot go forward, spend our time going back, reviewing our lives, remembering all that beauty and terror and wonder, remembering Bengal tigers and national parks and childhood summers, which in memory have grown impossibly fecund. In our imaginations, we revisit fireflies the size of helicopters, dandelions as large as moons, grass so soft and sweet it would rival the finest mattress. We remember learning to read, drinking from sippy cups, opening birthday gifts. Some of us have acquired powers of memory so prodigious that we believe we can remember more than that: our first words, our first steps, even our first breaths. And some go farther back still, into the womb, that warm and pulsing home: back into our mothers, whether they loved us when we emerged or not.

4.

When did our mood start to change? Maybe the timing was different for everyone, for the few of us left, tiny islands clinging to survival as the communications networks continued to fail, as outposts we’d heard from regularly fell silent. Everyone we could still talk to had a story. Noticing that there were still pinecones. Seeing something rustle in the scorched grass, something alive and hiding. Hearing the harsh call of a bird overhead.

Probably for many people the mood never changed. We have no way of knowing how many of our connections fell silent from starvation, illness, suicide. But those of us clinging to survival began, very slowly, to treasure signs of life, even if it wasn’t ours. We’d known life would continue—the cockroaches!—but we’d resented it. We’d grieved our own extinction.

Now, when so little time was left, some of us turned from grief, clutching at shreds of hope, trying to discern (gently at last, and in wonder) what the world will look like without us. And finally someone said—our fragile, broken networks taking up the idea and spreading it, another People’s Microphone—“We need to honor Mother’s Day again.”

5.

And so. On the second Sunday in May in North America, as nearly as we can calculate it, we gather again at the old site: many fewer of us, many sicker, but we’ve made the pilgrimage from the new coastlands, so different from the old ones, from mountain fortresses and the shrinking remains of forests. It has taken some of us months. One wiry, enterprising person arrives on an ancient bicycle, held together with equally ancient wires, with tough vines, with strips of disintegrating clothing. Someone else, with a companion—both of them desperately ill, but resolute—has braved the new oceans in a canoe made from a hollowed out tree. A village of eleven people has walked for sixteen weeks to get here.

We gather. We count ourselves. There are eighty-nine of us. We know that there must be other people on other continents, other people on ours who never heard the news, or who heard it and couldn’t or wouldn’t make the trip. We know that we are not in fact the last eighty-nine humans on the planet. But it feels like we are, because this gathering is so much smaller than it was for Gwynnie Abernathy.

No matter. It is Mother’s Day, and each of us has gone to great lengths to find, and bring, a mother, or evidence of a mother.

Some of us have brought plants bearing fruits or seeds: a peapod, a potato, a flowering cactus. A tiny jar of cottonwood fluff. A sunflower.

Someone has brought a finch and its nest, tenderly transported, the bird tamed and brooding on the eggs. Someone else has found a mouse with tiny pinkies clinging to it. A dog, emaciated but pregnant, follows her person into camp.

And of course, there are insects. We admire several varieties of spiders, a praying mantis, and, yes, a cockroach and her egg sac.

We don’t know how many of these lifeforms will survive us, how many of them will die when we do, or soon afterward. But for several hours, each person takes the stage, and displays the mother they have brought here, and offers thanks and entreaties.

“Evolve, and love each other.”

“Don’t use fossil fuels!”

“Try not to invent an internet.”

“War is bad, and so is consumerism.”

“Let the Luddites win.”

“Don’t let the sun go down on your anger.”

These messages surely aren’t understood by their recipients, but we understand them. We understand where we went wrong. We know we can’t go back, can’t undo any of it: too late for that. But we aren’t mourning anymore. We’re looking forward again, to what the plants and birds and insects will become. We welcome the new cockroach overlords, although we will not live to see them.

Mother’s Day is once again a celebration.

We don’t know what the future of these mothers and children will be. We don’t know what will happen after our own lives end. But really, hasn’t that always been true?