A Year

It’s been a year.

The human mind keeps a damn good calendar. We offload a lot of it onto paper or computers or other such things these days, and for most of the events we need to remember that’s a pretty good strategy – I know I couldn’t keep track of all of the appointments for my job in my head these days the way I used to do for other jobs I’ve had.

But some things stand out, all on their own, and you don’t need to check your device – you just know.

A year ago yesterday I came home from work exhausted, slumped into the rocking chair in the living room (well, one of them – we like rocking chairs) and declared to nobody in particular that I was not going to move from that spot for the rest of the weekend. Food would be brought to me or I would simply go hungry and it mattered not a bit to me which one happened. It had been a long few weeks in a long year after several other long years, and the Eagle had landed hard.

And then the phone rang.

The following morning I was at O’Hare, waiting for a flight to Philadelphia. That’s where I was when I found out that my mom had died, in an airport waiting area, not really watching the flights come in and go out.

It had been a long time coming, but it was still a moment.

The flight was uneventful. The ride to her apartment wasn’t any more memorable, really. By the time I got there everything was settled – it was just my brother and me, surrounded by stuff.

We went out and found a place to get lunch. You have to eat. I think my mom would have approved.

It’s going to be a quiet day today. I do have a bottle of wine that the senior living facility where she lived had given her on her one-year anniversary there back in 2018, though. I’m not entirely sure how it ended up with me – lots of things did since I have more storage space than my brother does and we’re still kind of sorting that out. We made a start on it when he came out here this past summer, and there is more to go. But it’s here and I may open it to raise a glass to her. Or perhaps I’ll save it for when more of us are together.

We’ll see.