My mother died January 30. Can it have been a month ago already? Her death was not unexpected, but was unexpectedly expeditious. She succumbed to emphysema, finally out of breath for good after a journey of surpassing hardness. Her death in hospice, relatively peaceful and fast, was in no way beautiful, but in almost every way a grace granted. It took just a single dose of morphine, just a week into hospice care; she no longer labored quite so assiduously to draw breath into her remaining shred of lungs, and that was it.

But in truth, nothing about my mother’s dying was easy. It took three years, and mostly was a big mess of almost unendurable struggle. In the picture with my cheerfully addled but seriously ill mother was my unpleasantly impaired father, whose confusion tipped into meanness. He coped poorly, irrationally, and often belligerently with the crumbling of life as he had known it, requiring me to call in the Marines (or at least County Adult Protective Services). All of it was endlessly painful on so many levels, but particularly wrenching because my mother was a woman of such intelligence and heart and vitality, a bright and warm center that held, at least a little, in what can only be called a truly and remarkably dysfunctional family.

What there is now … what there is now is just tremendous loss, grief, and all that goes with it; there is just so much, and I feel so often just undone by it. “The loss of the ground note”–the title of a book I have seen about women losing their mothers.