When the call comes in at that hour, you know.
I quietly turned off the alarm on my side while Richard talked to his brother-in-law. He confirmed to me the news from what would have been his mother’s point of view as she’d struggled through it all rather than ours in our sense of loss, telling me, not, She’s gone, but rather, It’s over. I wondered at how he’d somehow said what felt like the right words for her sake. He then in turn called each of our children, with tears.
Tuesday, after Lynn’s loss, when Richard got home I had told him CALL. YOUR. FOLKS. He felt it too. He is so glad he did.
Wednesday, I was flipping through the CD changer and stopped at an old Carole King album I hadn’t listened to in a goodly while. I don’t know if it even got to this song before I turned the stereo off and walked out the door, but her “Only Love Is Real,” followed by the line, “everything else is illusion” sang in my head all evening yesterday as I went off to Purlescence, all night, and first thing this morning when that phone rang with the news.
I’ve been trying to send a card every week with nature scenes, mostly birds, for some time now as my small part in supporting everybody there from our physical distance. I missed the mailman yesterday, ruefully, and got one ready a few minutes too late and put a Forever stamp…on… and looked at that envelope and that stamp and felt in my bones, she’ll never see this one.
But they had given them encouraging news two days ago that the time was not so imminent, I protested to myself, not wanting it to be true. Her youngest had flown in that afternoon and I wanted my sister-in-law to at long last have more time than that with her mother. Sister-in-law had been recovering from cancer treatments herself and was finally able to make it there.
Goodbye, Mom Hyde. We love you.
Richard added that the brother-in-law who’d called us had already told Dad he had a place to live with them. No need to uproot again. Never to have to be alone. At the timing of his choice.