“My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death”, he said to them. “Stay here and keep watch”.

“The script is what you’ve dreamed up – this is what it should be. The film is what you end up with” – George Lucas.

I know this was not the script she wanted for her life. She wanted the white picket fence and the happily every afters. “You can’t fix a bad script after you start shooting. The problems on the page only gets bigger as they move to the big screen.” Howard Hawks.

There was no gentle departure. “Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone…. silence the pianos….. Only a ripping off of a thick wax bandage on years of old growth.

Saturated in my own pain, guilt and sorrow I arrived at the hospital during visiting hours. He was sitting in the chair next to the bed. With my brother on the other side hovering over mom like a large bird protecting a nest of fragile eggs. I stood back like a wax model, numb, unable to function. Shame pushed me to the back row of the church a beggar in rags, silently just wanting to be present.

A space opened for me and stepping in slowly, afraid and gentle like a baby octopus venturing its tentacles out from under a cave I reached out for her hand. Her hands were warm and soft like a babies. Without words I held on and then came that gentle squeeze, that, “I see you squeeze” that pumped warm red blood through my heart. Our spirits connected in that large universe that didn’t need words.

We straightened her pillows as her eyes opened and glanced in my direction. The clock on the hospital wall in the intensive care unit ticking way the time. “All my children are here” she said like a little girl at a tea party. “Yes” he smiled at her “they are all here”. She closed her eyes in exhaustion. I kissed her lips saying “Goodbye mom, I will see you tomorrow”.

Tomorrow, tomorrow when is tomorrow?. Tomorrow is somewhere waiting in eternity until tomorrow comes. It was our last kiss, our last goodbye, our forever and ever goodbye. The tears will flow when I take my mind back and I won’t stop them.

Our voyage was filled with laughter, joy, pain, confusion and unspoken love.

Love took me back to another bed a few years earlier. It was my grandmothers bed, my mothers mother. With my mother standing in the next room “she never told me she loved me”. With me sitting on my grans bed putting this question to her as gently as I could. “But she knows I love her”. came my grans response. My mother cried her own silent tears those nights knowing her own mothers journey was coming to an end.

If only everything was simple and easy and love flowed like water through kitchen taps. But plumbing can be a messy business, drains blocked and smelly, fat and grease build up. It takes maintenance to keep the plumbing working.

We had so many blocked drains in our life, so much unresolved maintenance that things just stopped working.

The story

This is the end and the beginning of a very long story. As they story unfolds I hope that it will touch your life in a meaningful way. It is the end and it is the beginning.