I didn’t understand those words at the time.
I thought they were simply the confused speech of someone whose mind was beginning to wander with illness and medication. But I would understand them completely in the days that followed.
The Loss
Two days later, when I arrived at her house on a Tuesday morning—arriving at the time I had arrived every morning for the past six months—the neighbor across the street was standing at the door with red eyes that told me everything before she spoke.
“She passed away at dawn, son,” she said, and her voice carried the kind of gentleness that comes from having delivered this news before.
I entered the house feeling like my feet would not respond to the commands my brain was sending them.
Everything was exactly the same.
The cup on the table where she had drunk her morning coffee. The old radio on the shelf that she liked to listen to for the Spanish language stations. The cane leaning beside the bed where she had used it to help herself stand in the mornings when her body was still cooperating.
