Resting Places

I got a call from my mother in the middle of the night - her best friend passed away, Leukemia, fast an furious.
My mother spoke with her a few days earlier. She says she was not afraid to die. She was a brave woman, my mother says, in life and in death.
I knew the woman well, she is the mother of a childhood friend and I spent much time in her home when I was a little girl. Our fathers were colleagues. I met them when my father was dying, they came to his beautiful memorial, sad and loyal.
My mother wrote her dead friend a beautiful parting letter she wants to be read on her grave, she says she knows the dead can hear us. I doubt that very much of course - people have difficulty listening to each other in life, the skeptic in me has a hard time thinking that we improve upon death.
Farewell.
A friend who dies, it’s something of you who dies. –Gustave Flaubert, Pensées de Gustave Flaubert