She stopped eating
when they took her keys.
The first betrayal.
Not death.
But being told where she could not go
alone.
Her car—
treasure, freedom,
her way of calling
every cautious driver—
Fool.
She refused a walker
till the last of her days—
would not bow her back to wheels.
And when she found her golf clubs gone—
forty years of freedom in a bag,
friends and fairways in the grip of her hands—
she wept into her tea.
It was never only the clubs.
It was the game,
the memory,
the self she still carried
swing by swing.
They called it The Gardens.
She called it The Home.
Too many strangers at tables.
Too much bad light.
Too little sea.
Then—Covid.
A tray at the door.
Days sealed in quarantine.
Her world grew smaller.
Her spirit dimmer.
But she—
a woman of glass and grit,
cutting light into color,
fusing longing into substance.
She was my mother.
The one who shaped my eye.
Fragments shining
when lifted to the light—
unyielding, unpolished, unfiltered,
her own.
Painter.
Choir voice.
Storm survivor.
Three strokes of a pencil—
a dragonfly could make you weep.
They called it dementia.
A word on paper,
never proved.
As if forgetting a name
meant forgetting herself.
As if rebellion
was diagnosis.
They did not see the girl—
Scheveningen,
wartime hunger,
stealing bread,
crusts hidden in her blouse.
They did not know—
her grandmother cast in bronze,
a fishwife by the sea.
Her bloodline:
salt and wind.
Storms.
They didn’t see her stash.
From Jude the Cannabis Dude.
At eighty-five,
she struck a long match,
withdrew into a secret cloud of calm.
But my sister and I did.
We found her secret,
smoked the evidence,
laughed until our ribs ached,
the secret still burning between us.
I remember—
the salt in her blood,
the sea in her bones,
the light she bent into color.
And ice cream—
Haagen-Dazs vanilla and dark chocolate.
A sacrament of sugar,
of silence.
She’d close her eyes.
Let it melt.
Slow.
Present.
In her final days—
she sang when she could.
Dona Nobis Pacem.
Grant us peace.
Her voice carrying oceans.
Her song—
mosaic of notes,
stained glass of sound,
fragmented,
whole.
Her hands, always busy—
mending, giving, gifting.
Windows for the church,
small suns for friends—
snippets of herself scattered like blessings.
After she was gone—
I found her in pieces.
Photos.
Stories.
Drawings.
An unopened package.
Every remnant
fusing into something whole.
Her last night—
I whispered celebration of life.
She gave that sly half-smile,
her last request, her only request:
“Okay… but don’t make it about me.”
But it is.
Because she was never one thing.
She was storm and salt.
Bread thief, truth-teller.
Ice cream child.
Stained-glass saint.
Every shard gathered,
fused into deeper insight.
A mosaic burning with color,
carrying her grit,
holding her light—
Until tonight—
the mandala,
my beloved inheritance,
fell without warning,
splintered into silence.
Her colors,
once flooding my room each dawn,
lay scattered at my feet.
My fingers bled,
my heart broke—
a thousand tiny deaths,
and I—
shattered with them.
I thought the breaking was the end.
But she taught me—
creation begins there.
That beauty is born of fracture,
and color only truly shines
through the cracks.
Through the cracks,
I saw her shining.
And even in fragments,
she dwells—
here,
there,
everywhere…
pieces of Nell.
