Mind Nomad Writing

I watched as my parents lost their parents. 

I stopped, my breath caught in my lungs. I waited for their response. I watched to see how they would fare.

Would this wreck them? Would they recover?

I sat with the ghost white mother who feared the demise of the man she knew as her father.

I stopped and sat quietly with words hovering behind closed lips. I waited to see if presence would return to her body and it did not.

I heard the whimpering and ‘unable to finish the sentence’ voice of my father when he called to say he had lost his father. 

I stopped, thoughts suspended in my mind. I waited for his response. I listened and heard only silence. 

I received shell-shocked ramblings and reiterations when my mother witnessed her mother on her apparent death bed.

I stopped, logic and resolution tempted to spill forward. I waited for reasoning to emerge and was left with a maze of confused internal monologue.

I read the panic-stricken words in my father’s email when he shared he was losing his mother. I stopped, energy resting above the tips of my fingers. I waited to respond.

In this moment of pause, it dawned on me that I had already tread this ancient path that my own mother and father had yet to fully traverse themselves. 

I had waited and watched for responses, looking for a cue, some kind of sign for how to handle these things.

Yet, I held the rehearsed memories of these rites of passage from long ago in the well worn grooves of my mind from the years spent losing my own mother and father.

#Parentify me Capin’