PROMPTuesday #13: Finish It

“Wait!” I screamed after her. “Your hat!”

She ignored me, which was to be expected. We hadn’t talked, not really anyway, in more than 10 years. I scooped up her black hat. The mesh veil fluttered beneath my fingers… as the autumn leaves scurried around the undertaker’s canopy.

So much can change, yet it all stays the same. So, why shouldn’t she be angry, hurt, confused and torn. Mom died when we were teens and now dad’s gone. What’s more her own two kids barely out of diapers and my one in elementary.

Our parents had loved us the best they knew how, like parents will. But mom couldn’t stick around because of that damn cancer, and the years had taken their toll on dad’s heart. I guess we figured him for the lucky one, the survivor. Yet, a quick death at 57 for him beats death by degrees that took mom at 42. In fact it seemed we were just getting over the anger from those cancer years, sis and I, and now the problem we hoped to never face engulfed each of us in our own way.

How to process more than enough grief to last a lifetime doesn’t seem like a marketable skill in today’s culture of denial-instant gratification. But here I am, needing family, especially sis, to talk this through, and now, like autumn leaves blown against canvas, my emotions are swept up in a tumble like so much trash on a boardwalk. And hanging on to a hat becomes the rope to the lifeboat in this malicious ocean we attempt to swim.

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