Gone

It was cold the morning she died. I awoke in the guest room to my step-father's light rapping on the door and a calm, yet ominous "Your mom's not breathing." I was on my feet and across the room. What awaited me---what I had been waiting for, already seemed, sounded..final. A light was on low at a side-table in her room and, there she was, there she was, gone. Frozen in the position she had been moving towards for days, her mouth wide open and raked upward, her eyes fixed forward, her bony fingers stretched out across her collar bones and grazing her lower cheek. My eldest brother and I were leaning in on either side of her, our hands resting on her legs and side, one of us said, "She's dead." The other repeated it. We searched each other from across our dead mother for what to do next. I reached for her hand, as I had many times over the last several days; sometimes to hold, other times to move it down along her side. Now it was cold and locked in place. For days she had been dead, but now she was.