(2002)
She sits alone by the window.
The house is soundless as the sun sets, burning the impossible last brightness of its expiring light into the dissolving clouds.
Restless, her eyes never still, she absorbs the silence that holds the house in its unyielding grip. She glances anxiously at the fireplace, its faded red bricks darkened from the heat it has provided; at the old clock shifting its solemn machinery, tracking the time that spun ceaselessly into itself; at the picture hanging on the wall, the faces staring back with smiles frozen in their forever moment. (Seeing herself, younger, full of life. Seeing her mother, younger, still alive.)
She shuts her eyes and feels the truth.
She thinks about her life. She isn't ready to die. It made no more sense now that she was the one unwilling to go, the one everyone else looked at and asked questions about. The one who had to make some kind of reconciliation with an outcome she couldn't control or comprehend.
She hears her son's voice saying, Is grandma going to die?
She hears her granddaughter's voice saying, Are you going to die?
She hears her own voice saying, Am I going to die?
YOU ARE READING
Please Talk about Me When I'm Gone
Non-FictionQuestion: How do you get over it? Answer: You don't. You don't want to. It makes you who you are. Sean Murphy lost his mother days after her fifty-ninth birthday, following a five-year battle with cancer. In this eloquent memoir, he explores his f...
