My heart sank when I saw her. She looked terrible. Her hair was mussed and her clothing, wrinkled and untidy. She looked nothing like the mother I had always known. While I stared at my mother in dismay, I heard Macy say in a low voice. ?I told you so.? I turned my riveted gaze from my mother to the distressed face of my sister and saw the same fear and concern in Macy?s eyes that I was feeling inside. I could almost hear her silent question. ?Where has our mother gone to?? Mom did not seem to hear the car as we slowly rolled the last few feet before the garage doors. Her slow pace did not stop as she headed for the side workshop of the garage. ?She goes there everyday and spends hours just sitting out there. I went to the door once to see if she was okay and I could hear her talking to someone but there was no one else in there with her. When I listened a little closer, I could hear her talking to Daddy.? Macy informed me, her voice still almost a whisper. ?She is grieving.? I stated flatly. ?I know that, Gina, but she is not just grieving, she is delusional. She told me that Daddy is still always right there and she can see him.? My sister answered and I knew she was truly afraid for Mom?s sanity. Our father had died suddenly of an aneurism almost six months before. He had been in the prime of his life and he and Mom had a great future ahead of them since Macy and I were safe and successful on our own. Macy lived near them since she had married her college sweetheart, a settled and loving CPA, and with Macy being a nurse, they lived quite comfortably. I had a good diplomatic career going that had opened the world to me since I traveled to many countries through my work. Mom and Dad were still young enough to look forward to spending the rest of their lives together and they were still deeply in love with each other and always had been. The world had been almost perfect?almost until Mom found herself suddenly a middle-aged widow and Macy and I fatherless. Mom had just reached the workshop and started to turn the door knob when Macy quickly rolled down her window and called out to her. ?Mom, look whose home for a visit. Gina!? At the sound of my name, Mom turned to face us and there was a very evident look of annoyance on her face. I could tell immediately that she did not want to be disturbed, even by her daughter that she had not seen in four months. She said nothing at first as she returned her gaze back to the work shed and my heart broke with the look of deep longing in her face. I watched her shoulders sag with resignation and then as if it were a great effort, she forced a half smile to her lips and said in a voice she had used sometimes with me when I was a kid, a voice full of carefully contained tolerance. ?Gina, honey, I am so glad to see you!? Later that evening after dinner, Mom just seemed to drift aimlessly about the house. We had hardly said two words to each other through the meal that I had prepared. When I suggested that we go into town the next day and do some shopping, she showed no interest. That fact rattled me as my mother had always loved to window shop or shop with one of us every time that she could. It was not from the lack of money because Dad had seen to their retirement years before. The beautiful rambling two story white stucco that they lived in had been paid off with his passing. There were a few good CD?s and some investment stock that paid well so Mom did not have to work unless she wanted to. The closed garage held Mom?s new car that was less than a year old and the half-closed one was Dad?s SUV, both paid off by insurance. The half-closed garage door brought something to my memory. Dad had just driven into the garage and was attempting to close the door when the aneurism hit. Mom had left it exactly as he had left it! I had noticed it before when I spent two months with her after his death but now, six months later, she still had not closed it? Macy and I had expected her to make no real move to change things for awhile since it seemed to be a normal process of grieving but now, it appeared that she had touched nothing but left it totally the same. A quick sneaked look at their room after dinner confirmed the truth that all of his things were just as he had left them. Warning bells went in my head because I was positive now that something was not right. I had left Mom four months before convinced that she was well enough to go on. She had then still been meticulous about herself and the house. She had started going out again to visit with her friends and Macy. She no longer sat everyday at the cemetery as she had for the first couple of weeks after Dad died. She seemed to be coping but what I was seeing now was not coping but a total reversal of it. She had lapsed into a different grief, one of total uncaring about things around her and if she was admitting to seeing Dad to Macy, she had become lost in some sort of dementia. I made up my mind then that no matter how I was going to take my mother out the next day?not for shopping but to see her doctor. My mother was dying of a broken heart! That was two years ago. Mom at first resisted every single thing that the doctor and Macy and I tried to show her about her state of mind. She refused to see that it was not healthy for her to sit in Dad?s work shop among his tools and wood crafts and convince herself that he was still in there working. She resisted everything but finally after constant insistence and gentle perseverance, we began to make progress. Not everything changed. The workshop remained just as Dad had left it but Macy and I locked it until Mom was well enough to go in there and enjoy the memories but stay focused that Dad was not there. He was gone from this plane of life and had passed to another. She began to slowly recuperate and find herself again. She gave the SUV to me to drive until I could once again return to work. After I left, she sold it. Macy and I helped her pack up Dad?s things and give them away such as his clothes and personal grooming things. Finally, their room became her room. Nothing could remove or was it needed to be removed of her memories of my father or the love they shared together. Their love had been rare and special and only through a sad twist of fate had they been cheated out of the many years they had left to share. Mom was still young and beautiful in her own way. My father would have never wanted to see her die from the loss of him. Eventually, Mom came to see me in Europe where I was working. She looked wonderful, healthy, attractive and alive. She stayed with me for a week but on the last day she shyly informed that she had been seriously dating a man that her best friend, Joyce had introduced her to. I hugged her with delight and told her that I hoped that it would be a good and lasting relationship for her. The light of happiness in her eyes told me that my wish had a strong possibility. If there was anything ethereal about something of Dad?s spirit remaining behind, it was the glow in my mother?s face when she spoke of him and their years together. People may die but true love never does.
