quietly there

It's been 4 months since Mom passed. Seems impossible. All the legal stuff is just about done. Her beloved little house, the house where I grew up, is empty of everything but echoes and soon it will have a For Sale sign on the front lawn. Life goes on and you assume that all is in place. Documents, furniture, memories, odds and ends, sadness.

And then, on a quiet Sunday afternoon that you have been determined to make lazy even though it winds up making you restless, a torn piece of a sentence in the novel you are reading brings this:

An early Spring day, warm, Mom insists on wearing her pea coat to the Doctor appointment. It has lint and dust on it and I want to brush her off, make her more presentable. She is wearing that scowl of impatience that seems to be her real face now as she walks to the car with the aid of her cane, She sighs at the chore of needing to fold herself into the Beetle. She is equally irritated to climb into my brother's SUV. Only the old car we wrested from her 6 months earlier against her wishes was just right. Like the 3 bears. She fumbles for the seat belt and holds it for me to buckle it in. Secure now, she settles back, but when the car starts and the radio comes on she flutters her hands against the sound angrily and insists I turn it off. On the way to the appointment she reads every sign aloud, tells me to slow down, tells me we are going to be late, picks up a stray Starbucks cup from under her seat and scolds me about not cleaning out my car more often, I am old and she makes me feel like a child. I try to joke her out of her ill temper but she will have none of it. "Oh, Patty" she sighs.

My brother and I had many late night talks about her, releasing the frustrations of dealing with a loved one who was so difficult to love. We knew we would miss her when she was gone, though.

It's just that you don't feel how true that is until you are having a lazy Sunday afternoon with the smell of rain in the air and a gentle breeze meandering through the house, ruffling the curtains and you have let your guard down and there it is. The sleeve of an old pea coat with lint on the cuff. And you feel the sadness in your heart and in your gut.

It's as if the loss is too great to think about when you are busy with other things.

I'm not too busy today. And I miss her.