Scott Graber

When mother was leaving this realm, I was with my brother and sister at her bedside. We were not fighting, although there were lingering disagreements, unresolved. We had — thanks to a last minute gift of Scotch — been passing around a bottle of Dewar’s; talking in the semi-darkness; recounting our peripatetic, mostly happy childhoods thinking mother might still hear us. Eventually the nurse came in the room, looked at each of us in turn, then said, “You know she passed 30 minutes ago.”