My Mother's Death

Hi.

I have not written my blog for awhile. I just wanted folks to know that I will start writing soon, but my mother entered hospice about eight weeks ago after a long battle with dementia. She died soon after. All of her children had a chance to visit her in that final week. Last week our family gathered in Kansas City for a beautiful mass to celebrate her life. We then lay her to rest with dad.

I miss her. My complex emotions really end in knots of silence, so I am borrowing the words of another to speak of her.

Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour

 Light the first light of evening, as in a room

In which we rest and, for small reason, think

The world imagined is the ultimate good.

This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.

It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,

Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:

Within a single thing, a single shawl

Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,

A light, a power, the miraculous influence.

Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.

We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,

A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.

Within its vital boundary, in the mind.

We say God and the imagination are one...

How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,

We make a dwelling in the evening air,

In which being there together is enough.

Wallace Stevens