Cold Silver Hanging

“I want you to wear, enjoy, love my jewelry when I’m gone.” Enjoy? Love? Haven’t felt that since she left- just this cold silver hanging on my neck.

“When I’m gone, give my jewelry to your kids I’ll never get to meet.” Her ‘when I’m gone’ statements always halted me in my tracks- boiling anger, at her.

“No, you’re not going anywhere, mom, wear your own damn jewelry!” But the ‘when I’m gones’ turn out important- so many questions still left unanswered so I ask, I scream at the stones across my chest, fingers, wrists, and her’s propped in the mountain grass, to no reply.

When night falls, termites emerge from cracks claiming to know her ‘when I’m gones’ but they don’t-scram! I boil with anger at their slime trail because why the hell does termite skum get to live through atomic bombs and freezing 3 days? Mostly, mom’s ‘when I’m gones’ aren’t bright nor shiny, nor do they just lay there cooly abiding by earth’s rules of gravity like this piece.

The ‘when I’m gones’ weren’t really about material things; rather, you can’t hold them in your hand, or store them away in a safe place. They were about preparing me for when she was really gone: this silence and summer cold, dust on saddles, lonely grass hay rows, swallows falling from nests landing on cement with broken necks, empty halls, broken down stalls, quiet morning coffee, no one to call.

Too intangible to touch, belly bloated with boulders, paralysis instead of that ol’ morning stretch, can’t recall the last time any hand even grasped my shoulders, absolutely impossible to see but it weighs me down like gravity— that’s grief.

She tried to lead me somewhat thru, while I still had my mommy to run to, but she couldn’t possibly with a loss of such immensity, for it is not until you never again hear her ‘when I’m gone’ that you finally start to see: The rarest stone of all trickling down to bottom of the sea.