One time in March 2019—two weeks before I debuted a new solo sketch comedy show at the North Carolina Comedy Festival—my mom died.

It didn’t come completely out of nowhere. She had been battling metastatic breast cancer, tirelessly, for 15 years. But then, finally, she did what euphemists call “turning the corner.” This time, her doctors said, she’d likely be gone within six months.

I let myself be swallowed in my new show. It proved to be a good distraction, balancing my learning about hospice care, how it works, and what it actually provides. The show kept me going when I learned the term “active decline” and saw what it meant firsthand. I was learning and being distracted in Greensboro, NC, while my mom was receiving excellent hospice care in my birth town of Charleston, SC.

Still, I had six months, I thought. Six months to perfect my Jason Statham impression. Six months to sharpen my Foghorn Leghorn-esque accent for a re-imagining of the life of Rutherford B. Hayes as a Southern president (the inconvenient and unfortunate fact that Hayes happened to be born in Connecticut and served in Ohio was, obviously, not enough to stand in the way of a bit). Six months to buy or make better props and costumes. Six months to maybe even write a new sketch about writing a sketch while your mom is actively dying.

If all went well, I’d even have some time after the show to incorporate feedback from the festival performance. Part of me was already trying to figure out how to get the show down to Charleston so she could see it after its debut. Or maybe I could try to bring her to me, so she could attend the festival. It would be a logistical nightmare, but I figured I could make it happen.

But that last corner turned really quickly, and she passed two weeks before I set foot on stage.

One thing to know about active decline is “months” can also mean either “weeks” or “days.” In my mom’s case it was weeks, the middle child of undesirable options. After one of her doctors told me “maybe six months more,” mom lasted almost exactly six weeks.

We held mom’s memorial four days after she passed. Then it was time to go back to NC. Back to my 9-to-5 job in content marketing. Back to the comedy club. Back to festival prep. Back to the drawing board on the first sketch of my show, which, for whatever reason, I now hated. It was fine, I guess, but the first victim of my untherapized grief was a local events coordinator with a fun, quirky accent and obsession with the Pro Bowl.

So, I furiously scrapped my show’s opening sketch. I needed something new.

Some twenty years earlier, I took my mom to a Second City improv show, which was part of the annual Spoleto Arts Festival in Charleston. At that point, I had been doing improv for less than a year, but I knew all about Second City because of Saturday Night Live (a show I began watching at my mom’s suggestion).

The show was great, and it ended with an improv game that turned into a rant about the pitfalls of capitalism. During the rant, the other players combed the audience for Blockbuster Video membership cards (it was very much the year 2000) and owners who would be brave enough to see their plastic skeleton key for cheaper Buncha Crunch get destroyed live. Sticking it to the man used to mean something; we used to be a proper country.

Anyway, my mom and I shared a Blockbuster Video account even before we shared a cell phone plan. You had your name printed on the back, and I’m not going to lie, it felt like a big deal. Our bond over Friday rentals was sacred, but she looked at me and said, “Well, we have two cards, this might be fun.” Obviously I agreed, and we handed over one of our cards to be bisected live.

As the performer destroyed the cards on stage to ring out solidarity for an anti-capitalist bit into the ether, he’d read out the names on the back of each card. He was so stunned at the number of volunteers, his proclamations got louder and bolder. “Jane Thompson is a brave soldier!” “Tom Jamison is a warrior poet!” And for my mom: “Mary C. Beshere is a badass motherfucker!”

That was the last one he read, and the audience went nuts. In the middle of the cacophony, my mom turned to me and nonchalantly said, “You know? I’ve never been called that before.” Those words solidified in me a need to continue doing comedy.

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