Flow Gently Sweet Afton

Today we drove back home from my sister's house in Western NY, where we spent a few days around my mother's memorial service. It rained all the way home, that steady gray rain that blends with the sky and the road to make the world a single color you try to navigate through without context or boundaries, a frightening blur of potential car accidents...

After miles and miles of blurry gray highway with no rest stops, we finally took the exit for Afton, NY, which promised at least a gas station where we hoped to find restrooms. Afton is one of those exits that sends you off onto a winding rural road with no visible signs of civilization for a mile or two, no signs for the promised gas station, no signs of anything until you're just about to give up, and then you come around the 13th curve in the road and there it is: a Sunoco station. With a restroom, and freshly brewed coffee. There is a God.

So now we're home, and I'm ready to get back to my life. My life in my world. Not that parallel universe I've lived in for the past month, the world of Mother Loss. A world where time is mostly meaningless and sleep doesn't take away the exhaustion. Where siblings find out how much they mean to each other, and which of our peculiar personality traits we've each grown out of (finally!) or still indulge in. Where spouses get to know their in-laws at a depth undiscovered before, and mates either find the support they need from each other, or sadly don't. I found what I needed from James, and hopefully my siblings found what they needed from their mates, too.

It was actually a lovely season in many ways, this season of my mother's dying. I wasn't ready for it; neither was she—she fought it all the way. And the grief rises and falls in me like swells after a storm, when the waves have subsided but the water still moves underneath in a silent sob. But I'm glad to have been given the time to do her dying with her and to be with my sisters and brother in her dying time. It was beautiful in all its sadness. And I'm very glad to be home.