after

The first evening...after...we would find ourselves shaking our heads, again and again, as we remembered the beauty and mystery and perfection of those last moments...while we lit more candles...while we bathed and dressed the lovely vessel that was left behind...while we listened to her songs and were grateful, all over again, that her troubles had "melted like lemon drops, and high above the chimney tops is where" we'd find her now...

 

 Looking for a photo to place in her hands, of me and my brothers, I leafed through the album I had made for my parents thirty-some years ago...and for the first time in a very long time, was able to feel the joy and pleasure of my mom's life again, seeping through all of the rest....I was almost giddy with it...for awhile...

 ....we kept watch on Mom's moon...had pizza and plum wine, toasting Mom at every opportunity...tried to watch a movie I had recorded for her weeks before with her beloved William Holden...

...but that didn't last and soon all I longed for was the oblivion of sleep...which I was given, until the early morning, when it was time to say good-bye to Mom's moon and hello to some of our new beginnings...

There was one more good-bye, tho'....

With the frost still on the ground,  I walked out to the far edge of the kitchen garden...near the fruit trees...and leaned my arms upon the fence and my chin upon my arms and looked at the curled and frosted leaves of the apple tree, lit up by the climbing sun...then closed my eyes and listened to the little birds in the trees and hedges nearby...and the echo-y birdsong drifting over the fields to me from our woods...and waited.

When I heard the muffled closing of a car door, and the slow crunch of tires on the gravel of the front drive, I walked towards the "hay-way" drive, as we call it, hurrying, needing to be in sight of the dip in our fields where we can always wave to our departing dear ones. It's tradition! In the good old days, Mom would beep the horn of her sky-blue Beetle when she saw us waving towards the dip. On this day, there was no answering beep, of course, to the subdued raising of my hand towards the black hearse glimpsed briefly between the shaggy pines...but it was good, never-the-less.

It is tradition. And I am learning on a whole new level how much tradition and ritual and ceremonials, large and small, take us into the heart of Things...and will lead us out the other side...