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It turns out that I was able to see the mountains. The sun was rising just as we passed through Knoxville, so I was able to see them as they rose above the highway and below the sun. It was really nice, actually.

The weekend was good, as well. The wedding was a lot of fun -- since they couldn’t have a wedding inside, the company set up a big circus-style tent and we ate in there, which in my mind was even better. The weather was perfect -- the fall is just beginning in New Jersey, with the leaves just beginning to turn and the weather just starting to get crisp. It was like a cool drink of water.

I danced too much and too hard for my age, apparently --- I was sore well into the next day, and while driving home. We listened to a Lincoln Rhyme book on tape, though, which made the time pass quickly.

I know this feeling very well. On my mother’s side there were three years in a row where some one died -- first my great-grandmother, which was expected, but then my cousin (a driving accident) and my grandmother (who was quite healthy). My grandmother especially -- she suffered a major heart attack and was braindead, but even after coming off life support her heart kept pumping for I think three days. My mother’s family were camped out in the waiting room, all of us, for those days, and we were loud and I’m sure annoying to the other concerned and grieving waiters, but we did what we could. Two things strike me most from those days:

the "death rattle" isn’t something that happens and then quiet. It’s ongoing, for hours and hours, and it can stop and start. It sounds like a coffee perculator.

my mother and her sisters’ cries when hearing the news that she’d finally stopped breathing. I learned a lot from how they reacted: I saw myself years from now when I learn my mother died; I learned that you’re never too old to be your mother’s child; I will never forget it.

My father’s parents died later, his father first, then a few years after that, his mother. Every time I visited home I knew it could be the last time I’d ever see her. Eventually, it was.

Death has a way of throwing life into sharp relief. I remember the bus ride to the creek where they spread my cousin’s ashes. It was fall then, too: he’d been driving to Tennessee to go to college and be close to family. We went through his CDs. I still have some of them.

I don’t know how else to thank you, mieum, for your story except through sharing my own. But thank you.

2020-09-14-Postscript-missing-mountains

Postscript: missing mountains

reply to "Passage"