KALEIDOSCOPE
IV.
I didn’t know how to cry. None of us were shocked, because we had been waiting for weeks. But grief grips you whether you expect it to or not. We just sat around the bed, staring at a limp form with heavy arms. My dad opened some bottles of Perrier and cringed as he drank them. He never looked away. I had never touched a corpse before, but it felt more natural now than it ever had to touch her during life. She waited until everyone was gone before she let go, my parents said later. She had a lot of visitors that day, and she’d been in a rare state of awareness. Her children (my father, Sonya and Peter) left her for just ten minutes. When they came back, she was just a body. I have no doubt that she planned this. For weeks, her lungs had been filled with fluid and she was unable to even sip from a sponge. But she chose her moment. The woman had been smoke and antique treasures and secret candy to me for seventeen years. Now she was something else entirely.
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