A Mother Fades Goodbye

Sometime before I was old enough to be this vessel of seawater reflections she began to dissolve. Husband dead, son revolving around one woman after another. I did not notice the ebb, how her eyes lost care or interest, how her housecoat insulated her from what she once loved in her slipshod way. When she looked at me it was through a tunnel she had dug for her mind, her presence wrapped in muffling blankets as if it were now always too cold to surface. I should have seen the signs, seen the slow disappearance, the pale waning but by then I only visited through the narrow gaps of my life. I told her to join something, do what other old people did... only now do I really know what old people can do, they recall and piece together, reflect through a seawater haze those moments when seams began to unravel, falling quietly apart before closed eyes.