This trip down memory lane has me looking back at things, piece by piece, and so I get to the letters I wrote to Mom, for almost 3 years. I went back and looked, and there it was, the first – Scent and Flowers – April 16th,  2014. Given that she died in October of 2001, basically, I was writing letters to the dead till February 23rd of 2017, and I published one last letter after a couple months break, How Do You Say Goodbye?  

One thing more I should add so you truly think I’m loco for cocoa puffs (which Mom, btw, never let us have), perhaps a side note, but an important one,  I used to believe that angels were just these beings of myth, until the day my Mom died.

That day, the moment just before, something landed onto those old pine floors that I felt as surely in my gut as I heard it with my ears, like a giant bag of feathers had been dropped from the sky, and it was at the moment I turned and saw that Dad was at her side, after speaking to his older brother back in North Carolina, and I saw the end reflected in his eyes and knew it was time.

I still wonder why I caught its entrance, why I was allowed to know, but maybe it is to share this story, that there is a being of some kind there for us at the end, to share that I know there is something more, something after and that at the end we are not alone. 

Normally I ended with my signature, or just love Paula, but not this one, it was never finished. Maybe this letter was really just for Mom.   

Draft dated February 21st, 2015.

You know Mom, some days you get up, read the news of the day, and you just want to go back to bed. It is such a cruel world out there.

I don’t know exactly how to start this post, or why it touched me so deeply,  wee ones die every day.

Before work I saw via my Facebook newsfeed yesterday, there was a lost 3-year-old, Elijah, somewhere in the GTA, outside in these horrible arctic temperatures southern Ontario has been getting, in a mere t-shirt and his diaper and winter boots. By 9:30am Elijah had been found the news read. However with no vital signs, and he was later in hospital pronounced dead.

I don’t know him, I don’t know the circumstances, or who his family is, but I had to write and tell you. I have tears streaming down my face as I write. I don’t know why he touched me so.

Mom, but if you can, find him, hold him, warm his little soul. He must have been so scared.

Today’s Globe and Mail had this to say;

At the start of the work day on Thursday, the boy’s face began to pop onto television sets, phones and computer screens. And what a face. With twinkling brown eyes, a toothy smile and the little tufts of curly hair above his ears, he was the picture of innocent childhood. Boy missing, said the headlines. With the weather what it was, everyone knew as soon as they saw those words what it could mean.