Dear Mother Departs

The old die quietly, their dry hands giving a faint rustle as they fall for the last time. They tend to depart this world in November, at the darkest hour of the night, when dawn seems just as far off as the spring that will never return. They leave little behind – a small stack of last-century's newspapers, a few chipped cups, clothes already smelling of the casket.

Under their closed eyelids flits a muted kaleidoscope of memories, flashing by in no particular order. They die with their gaze fixed on the hardening diorama of a long life that, in its final moments, always seems to have been far too short.