It was a mourning morning.
Surely that is an evil way to think only two days after Easter.
But a small, almost living thing--this thing that makes two ME’s a WE--was dead.
And I was alone...again.
And suddenly, with one thought, I felt the whining, childish fool.

For wasn’t it just last year, the day after Easter...that I buried her...
Not a relationship...but a (formerly) real live human being...
woman, wife, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother.
She was the woman I met but never knew-
all that had been “her” was long-veiled
behind six years of strokes and
maybe something more dreadful by the time I met her.
Three days earlier she had slipped away quietly in my hands
as my prayers did little more than loose the hold
of his clinging, shaking hands,
gripping tightly to their 56 years together...
loosed it long enough for her to drift away.
He wept...for hours. I just held on.

And as I stood with him in the middle of what seemed like a farm of the dead on that bright blustery Monday a year ago, I remembered.

It was six Easters before that another one slipped away,
undone by a decade of strokes and
a body that, at long last, had grown tired of survival.
My mother’s father...the screaming German...
a moody and mercurial tiny man
with a huge, though dangerously short, temper.
Though he was hardly tiny of spirit or generosity.
He was also the giver of inappropriate pinches,
his only discernable display of affection.
He was Paw-paw, who really didn’t like me much,
but it didn’t stop him from loving me.

And I remember again…
It was his going that led me, at least in part...
in an odd, roundabout way
to where and who I am today.

From mourning to morning...