Mom

It’s been a month and a day since Mom died. And in that time, I’ve lived a month and a day and a year. I’ve gone through her stuff: everything from learning about her estate plan, to pulling her purses off the shelf of her closet and digging through her desk drawers.

I leafed through her address book. All the people (almost) in it are dead or disbarred, or have disappeared in Parts Unknown. There should be a country named Parts Unknown, where all the lost people go. The people who, well, you don’t know if they died, or moved, or… The sort of country that’s a convenient holding place for inconvenient people. Or inconvenient memories. Perhaps those two are the same thing.

Can’t say I miss her, but in the spaces between conscious thought, I find myself wondering, “She’s only been dead a short while – I should still be able to get her on the phone.”