Here is the final page of the memoir I'm working on, now in 2nd draft, logging my experience with my mother as she journeyed through vascular dementia, stepping out of this world in August 2023.
RAINBOW
There is a rainbow. I drive to the facility where my mother was housed for two and a half years. Eight weeks after she died. I have to make a few trips a few times. I have to get the memory of schedule and travel time out of my body or let my body experience it differently; experience it not going inside via electronic key, not pressing the keypad numbers that open the door to Memory Care, not passing through, not finding my mother, not in the hallway, not with the nurses, not in her room, not in her chair, not in the living room, not at the table staring down alone, not in her wheelchair, no longer in bed. It is pouring rain and waves of gray pass low over the car. I drive the paths of our many walks. Through the lull of silently churning clouds a rainbow appears. It is pouring rain, but there is somehow an opening in the sky, not an entire clearing, but a lifting of the heavy gray so that a singular patch of blue comes through and from that seeping of sunlight the rainbow stretches whole across the pouring down, and the rainbow stretches overhead, reaching, end to end, over the ground of the paths on which I wheeled her; over the memory, over the heartache of this loss, of the many times of our walks, and my tears, for the moment of parting clouds, for the moment of rainbow, in stunned wonder, stop.