The burgeoning of spring opens new wounds of grief.

My mother’s heart shuddered to stillness in the dead of winter, the trees stark and leafless. It was one of the coldest nights in years. Yet there was also a mist in the air, heavy and warm and strange, as my mother’s body was wheeled out of the care center into a brightly lit driveway.

It was around 3 in the morning. The gurney bearing the still soft body of my mother was being pushed toward a waiting hearse by two young men from the mortuary, one of them with an enormous belly; their bleary looks and the rumpled khaki pants below their blue blazers suggested they had been yanked from sleep to answer yet another call on the death beat.

After we had left my mother’s room ahead of the mortuary men, my sister had gone to her car and A. had continued on toward ours, but I felt compelled to stop in my tracks as the two young men wheeled my mother’s body slowly by. To bear witness. The almost imperceptible roundedness in the black body bag that was both my mother and not my mother. The mortal remains of her. The spent shell of her; its heat and light gone. The vessel in which she had lived for nearly 85 years, its wrecked lungs finally done.

The dead of winter. The dead of night. The frozen stillness of a January grief. My tears thickening in the peculiarly warm mist on that cold and starless night when my mother’s spirit departed the world and left this ruined shell to be buried in her memory. The world seemed too iced in to care.

The dirty snow in the parking lot. Not a leaf to flutter at my mother’s passing, not a flower to droop in sadness, not a bird to trill a mourning note.