In this newsletter, I’m copying a piece I wrote off the top of my head for my Post., “Green.” It should partly explain why my efforts to crank up my newsletters stalled. I’m dealing with one of those situations all middle-aged people eventually encounter (if it didn’t happen earlier in life), a dying, elderly parent.
Green
A green comet is returning to our solar system this month for the first time since the stone age.
And my mother is dying. She goes into hospice tomorrow. She could have six months left. She could have six weeks. Or six days. She caught COVID and the flu, then developed pneumonia and the stress of it all, particularly COVID, I'm sure, pushed her heart to its limit and beyond. It is unlikely she'll last much longer than six weeks.
I wish I was innately mystical enough to believe she'll go with the rare green comet when she goes. It would be fitting, as all her life it was green things that comforted my mom. She watched my brother and sister leave home and struggle with mental illness and substance abuse in their own ways and she still went to her garden once the weather warmed and planted green things again.
My brother committed suicide in 2000, and my parents moved from their original retirement home in Guadalajara to Alabama where they bought a house and turned its back yard into a green paradise. Paths through shrubs, a patch of vegetables, and a little pond that in the summer hosted a gathering of small green frogs. Their chirruping formed a chorus for the fireflies lifting up from the wetlands behind my parents' house to dance to.
My father had a stroke. In his recovery mom still tended to her plants and flowers every day, and eventually he recovered to where he could follow her out into the sun and help. He might bitch the whole time, but he did it.
My sister died in 2016. A bout with the flu turned into sepsis. Mom watched her go. The day she died my father saw a rainbow that seemed to end just outside the fence surrounding their back yard. Later they planted a tree nearby and buried my sister's ashes there.
My mom won't be able to get out and see the green comet, even if she lives through its circuit of the solar system. I do know she would love the fact of it, and she would step out into the night and watch it with me if she could, as she sometimes did during meteor showers when I was a kid.
I need the fact of the green comet coming back after 50,000 years. My mother always found her peace among green and growing things. Green is the color that always comes back again when the weather grows warm and the insects stir and a part of you has grown a little convinced that darkness and ice will never stop closing in. She taught me to believe in the constancy of all things green. She led me to believe it can sometimes heal wounded souls as well.