Winter Loon

by Susan Donovan Bernhard

Wherever a soul is—in the heart, tendons, the vital organs

beneath bones, behind eyes, between the ears—it broke apart in me, splintered, became a thing that longed but did not have.

wanted him to leave and to hold onto me. I wanted him to shut the hell up and to tell me I’d done all I could. I wanted his comfort. I got his pain.

I had spent nights away from my mother, but I’d never known a place called home where she did not live. What was home without her?

“You need to think of it this way. Each new day is like a new life. More chances to make good and be honorable. That sun goes down, it can take sorrow with it, leave

it on the other side if we let it. But you, you hold onto things.”

I was not able to put my thoughts together right then, not for years, that the ice had closed in on my mother long before she went out onto Bright Lake.

It was the dying that got me, not the dead.

BLUE LIGHTS FROM TELEVISION SETS flashed in

front room windows as we drove by house after house of life going on. Gip’s dying didn’t matter to them any more than it mattered to me.

Being hateful won’t get you anywhere. Wisdom is not gained through vengeance.”