It was not quite two weeks after Maria died and my husband had to attend a meeting. I had “babysitters” all the time, and on this particular night my closest friend was sitting with me, listening to me, as I struggled to endure yet another hour. I began explaining how I stripped Maria’s bed and had taken all the linens to the basement, washed everything, and planned on putting her bed back together…just to try to make some order out of the chaos. Once her bed was made, I thought, we could at least sit on it as we went through her life and tried to clean out the room. I told him that once the bed was stripped, I saw the stain on the mattress: the stain from her body slowly shutting down for several hours as my husband and I slept, totally unaware that she was leaving us forever. I went on to say how I brought a cloth and water and bleach to that stain, and scrubbed at it all I could; rinsing out the cloth and scrubbing again and again, in order to get it clean and let the mattress dry out before I made up the bed. He just listened as I went on and on, nodding his head with understanding. Once he knew that I was finished he said to me, “Get rid of that piece of death.” Immediately I knew what I had been doing. I was still the mother, desperately trying to clean up the mess, desperately trying to get the inevitable to just go away.

When I got rid of her clothes someone suggested, “What about giving them to Good Will?” I wouldn’t hear of it. I was very adamant about what I was keeping of hers, and what should never be touched by anyone…ever again. Her clothes went out to the curb for trash pick-up on Wednesday; piles and piles of what she slipped on, walked and sat in, ate and talked in, and searched and searched and searched in. They were all packed into huge black bags to be hauled away by village workers. The cruel January winds seemed to freeze those bags into a cruel and torturous finale, below those moonless nights without end.

Then the suitcases: the ones that still had to come back from rehab because she didn’t take everything when she left. I sat on the living room floor with everything towering around me as I handled every touch that was returned…from the last seasons of her life. Suddenly I resurfaced from that solitary immersion and realized I was alone. The room was full when I started taking inventory, but now, I sat alone. I didn’t even notice that one by one, my family and friends had left to go home. They knew I was unreachable…that I was too absorbed in Her. And the day her rug went out…pieces and pieces, rolls and rolls of pink cotton candy carpeting that felt her feet go from sneakers to stilettos, her step go from hopping and jumping to slow, and even staggering…as she struggled through what was left of her world. The rug, too, went out to the curb; they seemed relentless all those steps and stages of how she was continually taken from me. Over and over, she left me, and left me…until I was really the one who was no more.