I should write about the end of it all. About that last, long, searingly memorable Saturday night when I kept my mother company as evening turned to night, as distress blossomed and abated, as love shone, as loneliness lingered, as tears flowed, as frost spread across her window.

About the next five days–her last, two of them in that horrible room and three in a far better, even lovely one.

About the last two days. About the night of her death.

All of this so deeply impressed on me, and in me.

But for some reason I don’t understand well, I just can’t revisit any of these experiences yet, at least not in any more depth than I have already managed to do. The memories are intense; some are comforting but on the whole they are heavy with disquietude. They go to the core of my grief, with its thick gumbo of sadness and regret and longing and guilt and anger and love stretching back to childhood and into the pain of now and into the unknown and the unfathomable. Writing about these profound memories will very likely be cathartic and clarifying, but right now it feels overwhelming.

I do want to remember. I want to gather the fragments of memory before they grow faint. But it feels deeply burdensome right now to have corral them into sentences and paragraphs. It overwhelms me.

I have so much else that is pulsing toward the page. The things I am not ready to write about have begun to feel like a millstone ’round my neck, pulling me away from writing.

Moving on then, for now. In time, I will circle back to those searing final experiences, the last week of my mother’s life.