12,690 Minutes

My mom’s body is being cremated today

My mom’s body is being cremated today. It has been 12,690 minutes since she died. I give that in minutes and not hours and days because that is what grief and loss and heartbreak feel like. Minute by minute. It shows up as tears, as anxiety, as beauty, as memory, as loss, as fear. Sometimes all of it at the same time.

Thinking about my mom’s body turning to ash is almost more than I am able to handle. She has been in a cooler all this time. Her body surrounded by other bodies heading to the fire. There is so much metaphor in it, but none of it touches the deep cavern of loss I feel.

My dad is restless. One minute he is on the couch exhausted and resting. The next minute he is pacing, talking to me about how much he misses her. So I have been giving him little projects he can do sitting down. Sorting things. Fixing things. Small tasks that give his hands and mind something to do. Something he can accomplish. But I know he has not stopped thinking about her.

Right now he is sitting at the coffee table drinking coffee. On that table there is a framed picture of him and my mom leaning into each other, smiling. Right beside it is a small fleet of construction trucks. Cranes. Dump trucks. Excavators. The machines he spent his life around, now small enough to fit in his hands. If you wanted to understand my dad, you could start with that table.

Yesterday I took my first shower since she died. I had not even changed my clothes. Ten days of grief and sickness and paperwork and phone calls and cooking for my dad and forcing myself to eat.

Standing under hot water felt shocking and refreshing at the same time.

Meanwhile something unexpected happened. My Substack “Calling the Birds Home”reached #91 in the Health and Wellness category. Ninety one. I know that might not sound like much in the grand scheme of the internet, but sitting here in this house where so much has happened over the last few weeks, it means something to me. These pieces I have been writing, these raw dispatches from grief and caregiving and love, people are reading them.

It matters to me because the truth is I am just a guy in a rural house in Pennsylvania writing through the middle of the hardest thing I have ever lived through. My mom is being cremated today. It has been 12,690 minutes since she left.

And somehow, through all of this, the birds are still finding their way home.

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