"How did Hillary do?" Mama asked me on Monday, 15 days before the election.

At 94, bedridden in my home in Raleigh, North Carolina, Mama was going down quickly. Her heart was beating irregularly; just days before, she had lost the ability to walk. When she turned away her favorite strawberry rhubarb pie, I knew it was only a matter of time.

Mama's absentee ballot had finally arrived that morning. It was a moment she had been living for since she was a girl: the chance to elect our first female president. She cast her ballot; I sealed it and drove it to the post office. But even by the time I came back, she was slipping in and out of consciousness, confused, and thinking the election had already happened.

Born in 1922, Mother was the rebellious middle daughter of three brainy, beautiful Olesen girls raised in Texas and Oklahoma. When her sisters married and started families, Mama headed for the big city, playing the field and pursuing a career. At 30, she got married (“I’d done everything else!") to an unorthodox choice: a displaced Polish Catholic intellectual. They had my older sister and me before she filed for divorce when I was nine. She went on to raise us as a single mom, earn her Ph.D. in American literature when she was in her 50s, and teach until her retirement at the University of Maine, her scholarship focusing on the contributions of 19th century feminist Margaret Fuller.

Growing up, I thought Mama was the most amazing woman in the world, and also the most aggravating. From my earliest days, she pounded into my consciousness that for women, the rules are different. The bar is higher. Women have to do more, know more, and avoid blunders—all the while looking presentable—to even have a shot. When I graduated from Harvard, the night before the ceremony I asked her to iron my gown and she refused... on principle. I wanted to kill her, but I had to concede that her battles commanded respect. When she learned that female athletes at the University of Maine were denied access to the weight room, she immediately challenged the system and won.

Even at 94 she was still fighting. The idea that a bouffant charlatan like Donald Trump could step onstage, spout outrageous rhetoric, do unthinkable things, and be applauded, infuriated her. "What has been lost in this election," she told me months ago, "is its historic nature. Blacks celebrated Obama's ascendancy, as they should have. Where are the women standing up for Hillary, cheering on her courage, brains and tenacity?" She was right.

This Monday afternoon, when I returned from the post office, receipt in hand, I stepped into the bedroom where Mama was barely hanging on.

"Did Hillary make it?" she asked once more, her words trailing, her voice almost inaudible. Looking at the fading light in her eyes, as her boney hand stretched out from her hospice bed, I considered how to respond. Do I tell her the truth? Hillary's poll numbers are looking positive, but the election is not in the bag.

"Yes, Mama," I told her. "Hillary made it."

It was what Marie Urbanski Whittaker had been waiting for her entire life. Within minutes, she was gone.