I’m sitting on the bed in my office at home, surrounded by my half-unpacked suitcase and all its contents. The smell of the last three weeks is hanging on my clothes, a combination of the hospital, the care home, and sadness. A light but stinging, pungent smell that I don’t completely dislike as it seems to be the only thing left of what’s happened, evidence that it did in fact happen, all of it. I’m still quite shocked by it all, though shocked seems to strong of a word. I’ve imagined the emails I will write, to try to at least finish this with some sort of financial reparation. Charging us for January rent at the care home seems fucking absurd, and fucking insensitive, seeing as she left there on the verge of death on the 31st and only returned for a few nights, to an incompetent staff and not the correct meds, meds that she needed to sustain her comfort and keep nausea at bay. We were all basically left to fend for ourselves, told by the med techs that we needed to administer the liquid xanax, morphine, and haldol, the meds they give old people to zone them out, instead of helping them to manage the pain while remaining conscious. This is so difficult to write, as now I’m in the processing part of this, away from the non-stop panic of the actual situation, stuck in between fatigue and overwhelm, not quite able to keep up with the rapidly changing needs, responsibility, and troubleshooting. Now I can look back and ask myself what the fuck happened. It’s scary, did I do something wrong? Did I do my best, along with my sister and Bettie. Were we left with the rope to hang ourselves, forced out of the hospital too soon, unable, unprepared to care for Mom?

None of this matters, I realise, at least not in the emotional realm. I take a break to have one from my last packs of cigarettes, and I check in with myself. I feel terrible. I am in between times, in a void that cannot be measured. My grief is mixed up with everything else, and all parts of my consciousness are jumbled together. Mostly, I want to stay still, do nothing, be sad. But my children are home today, as it is Wednesday and there is no school in France, so I am home with them. Today I have set, and will keep, the bar low. I have made pancakes for breakfast and cleaned up after all of us. The floor needs to be vacuumed and mopped but I will leave that for another time. I shake out the rugs, doing just a step above the minimum so that at least they are clean. I have started laundry so that the kids will have their uniforms clean for Friday, and the boys’ favourite sweatshirts will be ready as well, if they chose to wear them again tomorrow. I will shower and wash my hair and get dressed, nicely, or at least not in sweatpants and a hoodie. There is homework to be done, but that will wait until later. I will take them to their hip-hop class after lunch, and I will have an hour to myself. During this hour I will buy a new plastic tablecloth for the dining room table so that they can have a place to draw that is clean and fresh. I will have to measure it first, as I always forget the length, so I will have to find a measuring tape. This I wanted to do before I left to the US, but didn’t have time, so I will try to at least pick this up where I left off. A tablecloth and a pretty basket for the boys’ room, so that they can pick up their clean clothes at the end of the day, the ones they’ve strewn about to find the right shirt or whatever as they got dressed in a hurry in the morning, or on the days they are home, the remnants of the many outfit changes they inevitably make throughout the day as they play.

For now, it is the mundane tasks I must conquer, the absolute minimum, so that I can keep our lives going with some sense of normalcy, while I adjust to my new normal, a world that exists without my mother in it.