None of us will really go grace­fully into that dark night. You should know we will kick and scream and try to stop death. You should know it’s not always vis­i­ble — the strug­gle and yearn­ing to stay right here in this very moment. It’s hid­den some­times, just behind the eyes, the fight to remain in this stage and not to tran­si­tion to the next.

You should know how to tell some­one it’s alright to leave. How to say you’ll be fine. How to say good-​bye.

Momma used to tell me, “I plan on stick­ing around a while.” In the dark­est of hours, she would mas­sage my neck with fin­gers made strong from needle­point and wind­ing woolen thread around spools, sort­ing it by color and strands. “I’m not going any­where, Val. Relax… Give your­self a break. Bob will still be there when I get there. He was a patient man.”

She would tell me to close my eyes. “Envi­sion a sheet. A white sheet. Hang­ing on a clothes line on a still after­noon. No breeze. Think of absolutely noth­ing else.” The trick, she told me, is to keep the sheet white, not to let any­thing else onto the sheet. And she would shush my ques­tions with “tsh tsh, keep the sheet white” …

What I couldn’t ask her then is what I can’t ask her now. How do I live with­out your poetry? And what is Christ­mas with­out the stories?

She stayed here with me to stop the silence from cov­er­ing the house with a deaf­en­ing shroud, thick and strong, opaque enough to let in sun­light but woven tightly to keep out the noise — of her unsteady foot­steps, of her open­ing a box of cereal, upside down, of her wispy night breaths while she slept a shal­low sleep filled with dreams of my brother and father.

You should know there are three dogs here now. Scram­bling and bark­ing, wrestling… pant­ing… and chal­leng­ing each other for top pil­low posi­tion on the couch nearby. The tele­vi­sion gives me Cary Grant, the stereo in the kitchen mum­bles Pub­lic Radio news, tinny sounds of Andrew Bird come from ear­phones of an iPod charg­ing, plugged into a lap­top chim­ing with email sounds, the cell phone beeps as a text mes­sage arrives, a microwave oven hums as it warms my cof­fee while the ice maker crashes two dozen cubes into the bin, the wash­ing machine and dryer chug along with domes­tic effi­ciency, the dish­washer churns, one neigh­bor uses a leaf blower while the other mows her lawn, cars drive by, there’s a bi-​plane fol­low­ing the Pam­lico River, and a pile dri­ver two blocks away slams pylons into the marsh as a new gen­er­a­tion replaces a CCC-​built bridge over the creek nearby.

And the silence is deafening.

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