Settling In Gently

We're slip-sliding offkilter (23.5 degrees to be precise) around this eliptic plane. We are careening PDF (pretty darn fast) around the sun, sometimes veering closer to the rays and sometimes shying away. And because of the dapper-doffed-hat angle of our planet, we get Demeter and Persephone's yearly push-me pull-you, with the swell of springtime flowers and the burst of heavy harvest, and the long cool rest of the earth. The waves reach up to moonlight and the stars move over us, hanging changing sheets of constellations across the sky. We're little monkeys and we like stuff. We're science monkeys and the world is neat-o. So we notice things like the planet hotting or colding, or the lights lining up, and the stars holding still. Also, we like parties. Hence, seasonal festivals! Also, we are worried little curious monkeys, and the fact that we grow up and die is freaky. So we try and puzzle it out, mapping our wonder and worry across the sky. When it's getti

My mom died slowly, and at home. She had a soft blue recliner that she sat in, below a skylight. Oxygen hissed into her canula, snaking from a noisy pump set to maximum. She struggled to catch a breath. Her lungs filled with water. Cancer is terrible. The treatment for cancer is terrible-- a long path of ordeals. Bone marrow transplants, many rounds of chemo and radiation, near-remissions and heartbreaking relapses. Cancer is something that happened to her. But death is something she did. There was a hospital bed beside her chair. I slept there some nights, in her last few weeks. I remember one night, lying beside her as she struggled to breathe. The gap between her breaths grew impossibly wide. I could picture the tall mountain she was climbing. Death was a place she was going, but the path was unclear. Death was a thing she was doing-- the name of the journey and the destination. Death was something she was becoming. Eyes closed, I watched her struggle up the mountain. Footstep