"The old lady's soul took with her the electricity in the house abruptly, leaving the hot house without air conditioning and light and scaring the shit out of her family."
My mother died. This date. Some time ago. It had been two weeks of the horrific experience of watching my family's bedrock literally waist away. I left immediately. No funeral for me. No internment. I refused to acknowledge, as I had done with the diagnosis and watching her pass, that she was gone. My grief was overbearing. For a very long time I would burst into tears. Eventually those tears, like the disease that had taken her, would wear away the millstone of my hurt, accepting that she was gone and relishing the good things she had done for me.
Memories also bring regrets. I share my stories with my wife. She is quick to chide me when I point out things mysterious I tell her from my and my mother's past that I ascribe to "just coincidence". I ridicule things spiritual (I'm an intellectual, don't ya know?)(and ex-Catholic, so there's that too) so my stories about my mother has made the two of them kindred spirits.
She is so tickled with my mother's moralistic agnostic Santeria bent that she has made her center spot in a little altar she has constructed in our living room. And, because she knows my history, one with large dollops of regret, the scars I bear about the priggish things I did or didn't do and what I said under license as the oldest male (Puerto Rican) child, she originally put that garlic there (long story) , something I repeat each year, partly to make amends the only way now that I can, but also, as tribute.
