Julia

At 2:47 AM, the time she died, I was asleep. Six hundred miles separated us, not much in terms of distance but too far in terms of years, resentment, blame. As I took the call the next morning, I imagined a hospice volunteer sitting by her bed through that night. I knew I wasn’t there with her, but I knew at once she had come to me, sitting by my bed in the wooden rocking chair that had furnished my room as a child, her presence so real that I stretched out my hand and felt warmth on the hard, varnished surface.