Orphaned

My mother died on Father's Day. She was 85 and had been in hospice care for 15 months. She was usually alert but bed-ridden and heavily medicated with Fentanyl and Lidocaine patches for assorted musculoskeletal pain.

My father, her husband for 59 years, died in 2013. She lost much of her will to live after that, but soldiered on for nearly four more years in her stoic Maine Yankee fashion. As her mobility and body declined, she kept in reasonably good spirits, reading, and listening to music and books on her iPod. On rare occasions when pain and frustrations overcame her she'd make melancholic and pointed remarks like "Where's the gas pipe?"

Losing my surviving parent has been less about grief and more about the finality of death. No more visits or phone conversations, stories and remembrances, questions asked and answered, and weekly notes mailed in between the visits and calls. She's gone.

I'm an orphan now but certainly not in the Dickensian sense one fears when young. It's also the realization and acceptance of generational rhythms and the natural order of things, and the fact that my new place as an elder and patriarch has moved closer to the end of that line. My wife's mother died in 1987 and her father in 1995. She's experienced these feelings for some time.

I walked by a Pottery Barn store this morning and saw this pillow on a couch. It stopped me in my tracks. I sat down and thought long and well about her, and said aloud "I love you Mom." She didn't answer back. I got up and left, alone in my thoughts.