The Snow Storm

My aunt is dying. Her body has been eating itself slowly for years, curling her some, removing memories, stranding others so that they are recollected but unattached to anything else, like the lone pine on the rock face of a mountain. She remembers my voice and me, but some days when I call she asks me about school, thinking I am still in school instead of having taught school for decades. The cancer is causing her pain. She takes opiates for the pain and now suddenly she remembers her husband and he is at the doctors and is coming back. For a long time she has repressed his memory. It has been a longing that is too painful. She watched over him and waited on him and protected him and pushed his wheelchair even as she began to forget what day it was or where she was.
I mention on the phone the snowstorm when I came home and took a cab to her house, but in my own confusion had the cab driver let me off at another road a mile from her house. She remembers as if the anxiety of the moment, even though she did not know about it until afterwards, had set in her mind. As it were, I got out of the cab. I told him that he did not have to take me any farther. He might get stuck. And I stood on the road for a few seconds and watched him cautiously drive off. I walked down the road that was too snowed in for the taxi and looked around at the dead end and realized that it was not my aunt's road. It was 1 a.m. The snow was still falling but now it was the hard bits that fall when the temperature falls and squeezes the last of the moisture out of the air. Being younger, I confidently turned back to the main road and walked toward hers, but as I went on, my hands grew numb. Coming from Puerto Rico and expecting to go from airport to car to house, I had not dressed warmly. My lungs stung with every breath and I occasionally I put down my two suitcases and tried to warm my freezing nose and ears with my barely warmer hands. I wore a jacket and loafers, a scarf that kept coming off because I had a suitcase in each hand. And I thought of my aunt waiting for me. I had talked to her just before I left the airport and she had suggested the cab. I finally found her road, but I could not remember which direction to go in. I was now desperate. I considered opening the suitcases and taking out all of the clothes and wrapping myself up and going to sleep next to the road. I could see houses, but all the lights were off. I walked on. Now I thought of finding a branch or a stone and breaking someone's window. I doubted if they would come unless I did. And at that moment I saw the house and a dull light from her bedroom, which was the only window that faced the road. I felt a sudden desperation and began to run. What if she and her husband had given up and gone to bed? Or if this was like a mirage in this desert of snow? And when I knocked, there she was, standing straight, smiling, as I began to blurt out what had happened to me.
I imagine that when she dies I will dream of her standing in the door waiting for me. The snow will not be cold. She will kiss me on the lips and her mouth will seem a bit crooked as it has since I have been older. And then I cannot imagine anything else, other than that dream of snow. At one point when she was losing her memory, my sisters and I sent her all of our pictures of her. I regret that now. I would like to look at them once in a while.
And is death like walking into that snow storm where all the windows of the houses are dark and you cannot find a branch or stone to break a window and wake them. Do we turn onto roads again and again that are the wrong one?
I do not know what to do. How do you say goodbye to someone who is not coming back?