The Bridge is Love

Sept 2013

I am face to face with my mother. An urgent call from my sister had me over the bridge from Manhattan to Brooklyn in less than an hour. I meet them in the Flatlands section, where telephone wires stretch high over the streets and the sun sucks the color out of everything. Not tree in sight; a desert of semidetached “Futurama” homes built in the ‘50s. What is my mother doing here? Medicare, I guess, Medicare is what she’s doing...

I am dreaming. Dreaming of my body aging: I’m with a group of young women; I ask them to speak up so I can hear. I’m with an old man, hair dyed garish red, who says “people our age. . . ,“ presuming I’m as old as he. I wake thinking sic transit gloria mundi . . . Thus passes the glory of the world, a cautionary line from the old Papal coronation ceremony, a little grandiose as applied to the little old Jewish lady my mother had become, but...

After my mother breathed her final breath, where did she go? Being present at her death was to find myself suspended in the profound mystery of things; death, I suppose, the original mystery, that is, after life itself. Even after we wrapped her body, covered her face and stood as she was carried on a pallet from her home, I couldn’t leave, as it was clear to me she hadn’t entirely left.

My sisters, niece and nephew dispersed to other...