for you

My dear sweet mama. We lost you yesterday.

It was bright and warm and cloudless blue and nothing but rain in our eyes. I had thought you were fourteen but you were only twelve, a mistake I attribute to feeling like we had more time together than we did. And we had a time together. I could say that losing you was sudden—a month between dancing at the end of the bed and your final descent into dream—but we knew the signs were there. A little bit slower, a bit more unsteady, the twin suns of light bouncing off your eyes more diffuse, then gray, then missing when you wouldn’t lift your head up to the sky anymore.

On your final day, I let you out into the backyard. Up to that point, we had to help you just to walk outside, but there you were, a cool June morning, too-high grass heavy with dew, wandering between shrubs on your own. When you weren’t staring into space or walking in circles, the haze of suffering would lift for a few seconds and the light you had brought this world would flicker on. I had to come and get you and carry you up the stairs after a half-hour because I was unsure of where you were. I didn’t know whether you felt lost, or more lost than you already were, or had fallen and couldn’t stand. I didn’t care how wet you were as I carried you. Being wet and warm and stiff-legged up each steep wood step meant that you were still here.

Eight hours later, I would tell you for the last time how I loved you. How you smothered swaths of this half-dull-razored world in brindled velvet. I thanked you for everything you were and everything you gave us. You looked up at me one final time as if you had remembered me. I hope you did. I’ll definitely remember you. I’ll remember the lessons you taught me. That ease comes best in quiet with company, especially if treats are near. That peanuts always reveal themselves to you, even if under foot or in the shadow of the stove. That 5 a.m. is indeed the best time to wake up, when small creatures began to stir and the wrens and towhees and thrashers started their songs beneath the final round of stars. That a family chosen is a family worked on day by day.

And now, your parting lesson: that you think that love overwhelms until it loses a steady, favored place to land, but that it is the grief that is, in fact, the riptide. Love, for all its crests and crashes, you realize afterwards was the shoreline. I don’t know when we’ll come up for air after losing you. But I’m grateful that the three of us were chanced with swimming through this world together for a while.

Thank you, again, for everything.