Author’s note: I have been looking for this bit for a while now! Evidently, I wrote it in the late nineties because I couldn’t find it on any of my computers, and the printed copy that I eventually discovered is in dot matrix. Here it is, verbatim, except for one parenthetical insert in the last paragraph:

This month is a long time coming. Every year I wait for it, wish it away, wish it over, live through it. On October 16, 1994, at four a.m. my mother died in her sleep. She had been sick for about a year and a half, and I had been 5,000 miles away letting my sisters and my father deal with it. The first time they had to take her to the hospital she refused to cooperate, and I wrote a funny poem about the scene as I imagined it. I thought that if I laughed about it, I wouldn’t feel so frightened.

The 16^th was a Sunday. She went to the hospital on Thursday for some tests, to see if they might change her medicine into something she would actually consent to take. On Friday I talked to her on the phone, and she said she was sure she would feel better soon. On Saturday I didn’t call again, but decided to send flowers instead. I think those flowers actually arrived on Sunday at about noon, and I often wonder what they did with them.

Had I known she was dying, would I have done something differently? In late September we had finally made up our minds to go for a visit at Christmas, our first trip in four years. She wrote me a letter, dated October 4; she was so happy, so excited about seeing us. My older son had been a baby during our last visit, and my younger she had never seen. Did anybody, on any level, know that she would be gone before we got there?

For much of my life I have struggled with the conflicting notions surrounding the ideas of an afterlife. The choice has always seemed to me to be between the absurd notion of God-in-His-Heaven, and the utter bleakness of the lack thereof. My mother’s death has not settled the question for me, and I don’t know if anything will. I imagine that when I die, I will know absolutely everything or absolutely nothing ever again. And if the latter is the case, then it won’t matter. This should be comforting to me, but it isn’t, because I want things to matter. It is not enough for me to remember my mother; I want her to remember me as well.

October: read, brown, gold; early sunsets and long cold nights; dreams, sometimes, of her as I like to remember her, of the family that (at the time) I could live neither with nor without. And beyond all that, the silent, singing universe, and the answers that may someday unfold.