Snow moon

The stupid sky refuses to heal itself. all day every day the grey, rain, freezing, sleet, snow, and combinations thereof. i mean, it is february in new england. i get it.

but now he's gone and the weather feels more like it's mocking us.

now the hospital bed sits empty in a living room waiting to be retrieved from hospice. my mom doesn't want to go back to the house while it's still there. along with the wheelchair, commode, urinal, the refrigerator drawer with morphine syringes. we went back once, some hours after, because we needed his social security number for the death certificate. in the bedroom, i looked down and saw his slippers. gutteral crying. is that a thing?

he died (i can't say 'passed' or 'passed away' or 'crossed over' or any other polite term designed to mask the reality of what happened). half the reason death is so difficult is because we go all our lives avoiding talking about it, and when we do, we couch it behind soft language and then when it happens--as it will happen to us all--the calamity of it is that much harder to bear. i'm calling it what is: he died. he is dead. there was death, there is death.

he died at 2 am and so we didn't sleep, we tried. we spent the day at the funeral home making arrangements. and then making difficult phone calls. and then in my case, staring into space.

but this: on my drive home from my sister's house that evening, february 8th, still less than 24 hours into this new absence: the snow moon. the full february moon on a clear night. i watched it all the way home. i took comfort. i begged it to be a sign of something, though i've no idea what. it was the tiniest consolation.

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