Six months, six years, six minutes

Today, sometime in the late morning/early afternoon, six months ago, Mom died.

I don't know the exact time, or even within an hour of the time, because I was downstairs eating my lunch and watching TV when it happened. She was alive when I left her room to get my lunch and she was dead when I came back an hour later.

Every day for a week the visiting nurse told me that she was very very close to death. That morning she wasn't even making the sad sounds she'd been making for days. But I couldn't eat in the room with her. I had to get away to do that. To be honest, I wasn't sitting with her all that much by then, because I was trying to get things ready...for what was to come next. Trying to field phone calls and do the things people do, just to survive.

I'm coming to peace with this; it's taking time, but I'm getting there. People have to do the things that need to be done. She was heavily drugged - if she knew was was alone, I had no clue of it. She appeared to be totally removed from the world around her...except when I would take her hand. Then she sometimes squeezed back and held mine. I left her even then, several times.

This morning I ate my breakfast in her room, in the re-decorated loveliness it now is, watched the TV that I got her last year, enjoyed some cool morning air. And I didn't cry until just now.

The six months without her feels like six years.

The fifty-six years I had with her feels like six minutes.

Tuesday I go to the cemetery to order her grave marker.

Things just have to keep happening.