T The Quiet After

They gave me Saturday as compassionate leave. Sunday was already mine. So I had the whole weekend to myself and I could spend it with Tom, these blessed two days of stillness in which I could use my time to think, and to begin the slow, strange work of reconciling with what has happened.

What surprised me most was the ease. Not happiness, not relief, but a quiet settling, like something that had been held too tightly had finally been allowed to rest. I found myself basking in it, this unexpected lightness, and I have been conversing with Nan constantly in my head since she left.

Proper conversations, too, not just grief, but urgent matters. She has already talked me into giving up vaping earlier than June. Since her passing, I have barely craved it.

As though my head and heart have been filled with a strength that wasn’t there before. I love that she is helping me from the other side. She always was stubborn about the things that mattered.

The family, meanwhile, has not changed at all. If anything, the arguments are growing more frequent, wild, furious fights about life that seem to erupt from nowhere.

I cannot quite put my finger on why death does this to people, why the absence of one person shakes loose every unresolved thing between the rest of us.

My mother cannot stay put. She paces, she fusses, she fills silence with movement, harassing my Nan’s cat, Brandon.

I think the guilt she still harbours will not let her rest … not like Nan, who is in the greatest peace of her life. I am entirely certain of that. She is reunited with her husband, her siblings, the family members who went before her, and she is having the biggest laughs of her last eighty-eight years.

She is sorting out her affairs, settling her dues, and in a few decades or a few hundred years, after she has rested well, she will be ready to embark again on a fresh journey.

And I hope, I believe , she will find her way back into my circles, so that we can carry on from where we left off, free of unfinished business, filled with nothing but love and joy.

My mother has mostly lost her chance to smooth over her side of the argument with Nan. That is something she will have to carry.

But I can wait with a clear slate. I can welcome Nan back in another life, with open arms and an open heart. And I will.