Stop all the clocks.

Santa Fe, many years ago

In this space, I’ve stepped between the mossy threads of my own life. For many years, my mother who lived far from me kept up with my life through my blog. I’d started writing stonysoilvermont the summer my then-husband and I split up. I was about to publish my first book. Although I’ve considered quitting, I’ve kept on, the disciplined scraps of this writing feeding into my creative life.

So it seems right to acknowledge my mother’s passing over into the next realm. A woman of nearly indomitable strength, she was ill for many years and surmounted multiple surgeries and illnesses. But none of us are mortal. My mother, who was a nurse for decades, knew this more keenly than most people. When I was a girl, she returned every morning at breakfast with stories from the hospital, some funny and some heart-wrenching — a child with leukemia, a cab driver shot point-blank in his head. One July morning, she carried home an orange kitten. We named him Oliver, and he lived a long full cat life.

Same, too, with my mother, a woman whose strength and passion shaped my own. In her later years, disease made her wander back and forth in time, into places where none of us could follow. My mother would have wanted us to grieve the end of her life, but not to fall dramatically on our knees. Raised a Lutheran, she was imminently practical. Nonetheless, I remember when I was 21, and my mother grieved her own mother. She stopped all the clocks.