The Long Farewell
“See her true self behind her eyes. Heed not how she seems, but who she still is.”
Leo pulled his ancient Corolla into the driveway. The familiar crunch of gravel under his tires was oddly comforting, but as he gingerly stepped out, an icy finger traced up his spine.
Something was off. The place just felt bad juju, like whatever walked these grounds wasn’t his sweet Ma anymore but something darker wearing her face.
He almost chuckled at himself. Ever since he was a snot-nosed kid reading horror novels in the lofts of the barn, his imagination had run too wild for his own good.
But the feeling persisted as he let himself inside the house.
“Ma? I’m here! It’s Leo!” His voice echoed off the walls under a thick silence. He deposited his suitcases in the hall and straightened up.
The air smelled foul, like rotting meat and older things best left buried. Mail spilled over the counter, final notices with threats spelled out in angry red stamps. Pillars of dishes towered in the sink, crowned with blooms of fuzzy mold. Somewhere a pipe dripped, each plink raising his hackles. Even Little Miss Tinkles, the tabby who had dozed many an afternoon on Eva’s lap, was nowhere to be found.
“Ma!?” Leo called again, a ragged edge in his voice now because he knew, lord help him, but he knew something had turned very Cobra Kai around here.
Dread sat like a stone in his belly as he crept toward the back of the house. The kitchen was a real cat’s breakfast. The burnt pot on the stove glared with a malicious onyx eye. Acrid smoke still haunted the air.
Upstairs, floorboards whispered creaks no human feet could make. Leo’s heart threatened to jackhammer through his ribs. He thought maybe the devil himself waited for him behind one of these doors, but somehow, what he found in Eva’s room was worse.
Gone were the photographs, including those of his late father. Only curled magazine pages remained, arcane symbols and desperate scribbles defiling her sanctuary.
Leo’s ringing ears almost missed the refrigerator’s electric hum change pitch from the kitchen below which now belched out a bone-quaking roar. He raced downstairs, taking the steps three at a time.
Rounding the corner, he froze. Leo could only stare mute, his mind scraping against madness as light spilled from beneath the avocado green refrigerator door, painting the walls with malicious shapes. The fridge rattled with a violence as if something dreadful from beyond the farthest black reaches of the universe struggled to push through.
Leo’s mouth went Sahara dry. He recalled a whispered childhood prayer against the things that gnawed and floated in darkness. Shutting his eyes against the light, he recited it with the fervor of the doomed. The air pressure dropped, the awful sounds ceased abruptly, and his mother stood there, gaunt as famine’s child but radiant with a loving welcome.
“Leo! You’re here!” She clasped his hands with paper skin. “Just in time for supper!”
Behind her grinned the empty, evil dark.
Watching his mother rapidly fade away was a special kind of Hell for Leo.
With his older siblings too preoccupied with their careers and young children to offer freely what their mother needed of them, Leo stepped up to shoulder the immense burden alone. Being child-free with a work-from-home career, he was the natural winner for round-the-clock caretaking duties.
What a prize.
As luck had it, his mother’s mental state had deteriorated so much faster than any of them realized. It was like seeing a magnificent tower crumble from the inside out as the disease ate away at her mind while he stood uselessly on the sidelines. Alzheimer’s was the wrecking ball, demolishing his mother piece by piece.
He expected the small stuff: a burnt pot roast here, a misplaced set of keys there. These minor mistakes wouldn’t raise any red flags. But these little slip-ups evolved into things more sinister and more bizarre.
He would catch her looking around with a lost, almost suspicious look in her eyes, like she had become an unwilling visitor in her own home. Names evaporated from her memory, and familiar faces turned foreign. It did not take long for Leo to realize this was no ordinary forgetfulness; this was an insidious hitchhiker that embedded itself in her brain and hijacked her neural pathways like a hostile corporate takeover.
Over the weeks, Leo watched as the mother he knew retreated further into the dark woods of dementia. Her bright spirit began to sputter like a candle in the wind.
On especially tough days, he caught glimpses of raw animal fear in her eyes when she failed to recognize even him.
Doctors handed out their diagnoses like packaged neurological insults. Dementia. Hardened arteries, like his grandmother used to say. No concrete cause or prognosis to offer. Pills, patches, and therapies slowed but could not halt the grim march stealing 10, 20, 30 years at a clip. They offered little comfort; this was an inevitable slide. The long farewell, they liked to call it.
His stalwart anchor of a mother had become unmoored and set adrift on a sea of confusion. He struggled to pull her back, to fasten her somehow to their shared past, but it was like grasping at smoke.
He took to chronicling her deterioration like a prison tally, carving notches into his heart with each new loss — names of relatives erased, cherished songs garbled beyond recognition, birthdays missed like they never existed.
The darkness Leo first encountered had found its way into the very floorboards of this house, oozing from cracks and beneath closed doors. It lingered in corners, an ominous watchful presence stalking their steps. At night, it manifested in the shadows that swelled and threatened to swallow up what feeble light remained.
Sleep brought no escape when it did come. Behind his closed eyes, the darkness was alive, writhing, grinning with malevolent hunger. His dreams turned lurid and frightening and brimming with macabre imagery of Eva’s descent: shattered mirrors reflecting only pieces of her face, a slumped marionette with severed strings, or her sweet, anguished face dissolving into static like a TV channel tuned to nowhere.
It twisted memories of his mother into a mocking corpse-puppet. He’d wake with her emaciated figure looming over him, wreathed in unnatural brightness, while the insatiable void of black trailed from her footsteps.
The darkness had already consumed the mother he knew. Now he felt it wanted him, bleeding into the spaces where love once warmed his heart and left, leaving only cold hollows behind.
He could feel it taking root inside him, too. Part of Leo wanted to flee this creeping oblivion, threatening to subsume them both. But he knew this was where he belonged, no matter how it tried to swallow him whole.
The nights came earlier now, as winter’s cloak smothered the city. Once again, Leo retreated to his cave of a bedroom, desperate just to shut his eyes for a few hours of oblivion, however restless.
He felt himself plummeting as if through endless sickly green cloud banks.
Then, all went dark.
He became aware of being upright, feet planted on a spongy latticework of roots goblined with knotted bark. Tendrils of fog drifted by amongst the towering trees all around him. He recognized the childhood woods abutting his old childhood house on Myers Road.
The last dregs of daylight barely illuminated a gloom-choked path, beckoning him onward.
“Leo! Over here!”
Leo whirled. A young woman waved at him near a lightning-split oak bisecting the path.
He stumbled forward as his eyes tried to reconcile the sight of his mother — his teenaged mother — with raven hair flowing over her shoulder. She clasped his hand, amber eyes glimmering with affectionate recognition.
“Ma? I don’t understand — what’s going on?”
“Shhh,” Eva smoothed his faded Led Zeppelin t-shirt with a sad smile. “I’ve come to take you to where you need to go, my star. I will be your guide.”
Before he could speak, she turned and skimmed down the wooded path, her floral skirt swishing lightly around bare tanned legs. Leo hurried after, his chucks slipping on rain-damp leaves.
“Wait! Where are we going?”
Eva spoke over her shoulder. “Down through the Circles. The doctors cannot help me now, Leo. So, you must see the lower depths.”
Leo grabbed his mother’s slender shoulder. “The doctors should be doing more! I knew the medications were making you worse — “
Eva met his angry gaze, her eyes centuries older than her youthful appearance. “No, my love. My position is fixed, as is yours if you keep raging.” She pointed towards the twisting shadows. There, at the path’s crux, an iron door materialized.
Eva approached and grasped the handle as terrified comprehension bloomed in Leo’s mind.
“Wait. Ma. We’re not going through that, are we?”
She turned back and Leo saw eternity swirling in the black of her pupils.
“We must. My star, are you ready?”
At a deep level, Leo understood then that she was right. He was out of moves. Game Over. Every desperate attempt to pull himself and his mother out of whatever darkness invading their lives only bloodied them both again and again.
Eva swung wide the door. Together, they stepped into a swirling mist.
Though he did not know it, an impossibly long descent had just begun. Leo set his feet to its measure.
At his side strode one who knew this suffering beyond human telling, who loved him beyond human reckoning. She would lead him down through the circles of her anguish — no more logic; no more reasoning. Only radical surrender remained possible now.
Leo took a deep breath and took in the smell of turned soil and sickness. But strangely, his battered heart found a kind of leaden peace, accepting he could indeed withstand even this.
And that might just be enough.
Leo followed his mother’s bare heels down a narrow set of worn stone steps into the gloom beneath the iron door. She gripped his calloused hand in her smooth palmed grasp. The darkness swelled as they descended, more ominous and permeating than anything Leo had encountered before. Soon, the impenetrable black smothered the pale halo of light marking the entrance.
This was the same lightless void that leaked from the cracks of the house above; the same entropy that had infected his mother’s mind and was steadily erasing all that she was.
But here it felt more concentrated, distilled, almost alive in its hungry watchfulness. It pushed against his skin with a million slick fingers, probing and prodding for weaknesses, seeking access to devour him too.
Now they ventured directly into its lair.
Down they plunged through murky depths lit by foul aerial gases seeping from the crumbling walls. Every so often, an archway of clawed doors reared, forcing them over damp stones lined with spectral inhabitants. Leo tasted bile when he spotted racks of medieval tortures jutting from the shadows.
Eva showed no sign of noticing the horrors watching their passage. Indeed, it was her younger self — the guide — that illuminated his way with her graceful stride and loving glances back toward him.
As they descended deeper, Leo sensed each ring contracting further yet recurring, like the fractals at the science museum his mother used to take him to, revealing exponentially smaller self-similar patterns.
It was as if they spiraled along the gyres of his mother’s consciousness, approaching the molten core where neural pathways terminally seized shut. In the choked-off silence between her glances, Leo came to recognize the endless shrieking air as composed of his mother’s shrieking synapses.
Eva jerked Leo’s arm nearly from its socket as she plunged into a wall of acrid, yellow mist. His eyes watered at the piercing odor like nail polish remover with an undertone of super-ripe decay. Wrenching him onward, Eva’s whispers held a jagged edge. “Stay with me, my star…stay with me. Ignore them.”
Mangy beasts emerged from the fog. The stink of carrion clung to their patchy fur. They circled Eva, snapping at her heels, but she glided onward, unperturbed like a queen flanked by her court.
What day is it, mother? one wolf jeered, matching her pace, its milky eye fixed on her.
Aren’t you forgetting something? yipped another, gnashing yellowed teeth.
Eva gazed straight ahead; her profile etched in marble. Only her angelic movement through the mist said she was more than a statue. Her stride never wavered as the beasts pressed closer, their questions rising to a pitched din.
How many grandchildren do you have?
How did you sleep, old woman?
What are the names of your sons? You daughters? You’re always getting those wrong…
These wolves sprang from the well-meaning tests by doctors and nurses and family, which were slowly tearing holes in the delicate mesh of confidence knitting Eva’s world together. The detached clinical setting intrinsically magnified each failed answer and chipped away at all the touchstones she clung to. The pack would never stop its ravening, seeping inexorably into the fog that was her short- and long-term memory.
And yet, Eva floated onward. Her stride was surefooted where fog-damped shards of flagstone should have made her slip. If she saw the wolfish things with sweating teeth at all, she refused to acknowledge them.
Thus, the vaporous forms slowly melted back into the limbic murk, though never fully dissipating. They continued stalking at the edge of Leo’s vision, to pace alongside the living soul and his spectral companion crossing their territory.
Deeper they plunged as his spectral mother guided her embodied son into the endless Circles of her fading mind. Scenes shifted in a dizzying collage around them like shards of a broken mirror refracting versions of Eva’s selfhood.
In an antiseptic hospital ward, ghosts wandered in locked repetition, clawing at green walls and wailing anguished questions. “Where am I, where am I? Who am I? Who am I?” they implored to orderlies, whose reptilian faces registered only disgust at these bothersome figures.
When they forcefully restricted one elderly patient’s arm, she erupted into infernal screeching. Eyes brimming with tears, Leo turned to intervene, but his mother’s jerk of his arm stilled him.
“This purgatory cannot be undone from us, only within. Walk on.”
The air thickened to an aqueous haze, and they emerged into Eva’s childhood home like a suspended animation in the years since her own mother’s feeble mind had eroded.
Here a perpetual tea kettle steamed, and the breadbox clicked open on an endless loop. Seated at the kitchen table was a ghostly vision of Eva’s mother when she was a young woman. The phantom cried pitifully in the voice of little girl Eva, pleading in vain for the soothing comfort of her absent father.
“She searches for those severed anchors to self, be it nightmares or joy. It is her curse,” his guide whispered.
With a trembling breath, he walked on.
The years accordioned. They stood watching Eva’s wedding; her smile blooming under an awning draped in white roses. It startled him to see his guide beside him, watching the ceremony unfold, gazing at her former self with naked longing.
She gripped Leo’s hand tighter.
“Do you see? The most joyous moments live alongside our deepest hurts. And, each loss echoes loud in the haven of memory.”
On they spiraled, vision after vision assaulting Leo’s psyche until he heaved over and gagged.
Now, a padded cell entombed the elder Eva. Her mouth was open in an endless scream. Men in white coats plunged needles into her. Each injection bloomed swirls of blood across the worn linen of her clothes.
The walls closed. The floor swayed. Leo collapsed, but firm hands pulled him back from the shadows.
“Stay with me! I am here!” His mother’s commanding voice and eyes anchored him and he clung as they stumbled clear of the writhing horrors.
They continued through pulsing fever dreams. He glimpsed his aging mother shrink smaller, smaller, dull folds of skin curtaining over her, then gone only to reemerge in a meadow, dancing through wildflowers.
“Look,” his guide murmured, nodding at Eva’s wonder-filled eyes as the madness momentarily released its hold. “See her true self behind her eyes. Heed not how she seems, but who she still is.”
Leo wiped away angry tears to witness the shape-shifting visions as selves canceled themselves and then rebooted like glitching digital codes.
“She is both lost and found in every moment,” breathed his mother. “Walk with her Leo — walk with me.”
The visions quickened, but he now focused only on syncing his footsteps to his guide’s.
When frenzied demons arose screeching, Leo let the discordant sounds wash over him like jangled wind chimes.
“Walk with me…”
And she, the timeless guide, led him on.
Ahead in the gloom loomed a rough timber portal. Beyond it flared a dull red glare accompanied by the draw of enormous bellows as they forced air through cracked pipes.
Eva thrust the door open to a rush of blistering heat and Leo’s eyes watered against the blast furnace atmosphere as they stepped through. Everywhere came screams pierced by the percussive clang of iron on iron.
Ahead, he saw his mother’s beloved face again; her kind eyes filled with blood as she shook her head slowly from side to side, unable to form words. Her withered hands strained against thick restraints, binding her frail body to a vast automated wheel that turned relentlessly like some medieval torture device. With each full rotation, Eva’s twisted form sank below flames roaring from vents in the floor before the wheel resurfaced her for another scorching cycle.
Leo rushed forward with an anguished cry and ghostly orderlies rose on all sides to drive him back with flamed-tipped batons. He fell to his knees and pounded his fists into the metal walkways at being unable to reach his mother, now fully submerged in an incomprehensible ordeal. Her beloved identity drowned in medications, immobilized, incinerated, voices stolen, minds broken.
It was too much.
Then he felt young Eva’s hand on his shoulder. She gazed at him with sad eyes yet still filled with compassion enough for entire cities.
In a fluid motion, she stepped onto the searing iron rungs, hauled herself up, and clung to the smoking frame now hoisting her older twin above the flames.
The orderlies jabbed her with batons, but their weapons blinked away into mist as she caressed the ruined woman’s brow.
“I see you,” she whispered in her twin’s ear.
Miraculously, the blood and restraints evaporated from the elder Eva. In their place came such a profound expression of relief that it stalled the pistoning fury of the entire apparatus.
Seeing the two Evas — one young, one old — comforting each other amidst the firestorm, shifted something in Leo.
And at that moment, the meat hooks released their grip on his mother.
Gazing at the two Evas wrapped in an ephemeral peace, Leo saw an alternative to his assumptions about dementia’s linear, hopeless cruelty. Here, time was cyclical; healing energies tracing neural pathways no MRI could map. This was a refuge from cold measures tallying all that had eroded in his mother’s stricken mind.
Leo dared to consider her identity could wholly reconstitute in each moment she existed — fully and miraculously.
He need only meet her there. He needed only to see her.
As the cooling iron wheel groaned once more to lower young Eva back, Leo strode to take his guide’s hand with renewed conviction.
Emerging from the industrial torture chamber into an upward-sloping path felt less like escaping and more akin to absconding together into some secret righteousness.
No matter the depth of the Circles, Leo would accompany this extraordinary woman who loved him into existence. She had birthed and would rebirth him as many times as breath itself cycled in whatever inferno or paradise the sacred wheel turned them toward next.
Onward then. Ever onward.
Leo wasn’t sure how long or how far they had descended into the deep. The passage warped his sense of time. It could have been years or mere moments since young Eva guided him through the first door.
His guide glided barefoot over uncertain terrain with preternatural poise. He followed doggedly through the Stygian gloom, one bruised hand anchored to her floral printed skirt.
He flinched as claw-like shadows scored strange hieroglyphs in the surrounding air. His steps slowed as the path tilted sharply downwards into chilled air thick with fungal decay. His guide kept on, unperturbed.
Only Eva’s floral glow warded off total darkness. Leo gripped that lifeline despite his bruised knuckles. Around them, shadows convulsed without a source as they sketched blood-red symbols.
“The way grows strange, but do not fear. Stay close.” Eva’s lilting voice held a thread of steel now. “Ready yourself, my star…”
With a rusty screech, reality’s fabric tore ahead of them. A cavernous hollow ripped wide as if invisible beasts clawed open the night. Foul air belched from the gash, thick with screams and the stench of furnace-baked viscera.
Leo’s guts churned at half-formed horrors scuttling just beyond sight. Madness unleashed.
Before he could beg his guide to turn back, she plunged into the scarlet maw. With a pathetic sob, he stumbled after her, his need to not lose her surpassing all instinct. Plunging through the jelly air, he looked back and saw the opening snap shut.
Eva’s golden glow reappeared from behind a veil of oily smoke roiling across their path. In her gaze, Leo knew what awaited would unknit his last frayed tether to sanity.
“Stay close.”
They entered a Circle where meaning itself appeared to fray and bleed out. He flinched as barbs of pain erupted up his legs like fire ants. The very atmosphere surrounding them housed jagged, piercing shards.
The choking haze curdled and gave birth to contorting shapes that screeched into grotesque impersonations of life. Eva’s beloved mother manifested as a writhing, starved phantom, her spectral claws raking bloody furrows into her scalp as her gaping mouth poured forth a soundless wail.
Leo’s imperturbable guide rushed to embrace the tortured vestige as it convulsed. Dark fluids streamed from hollow sockets before the phantom imploded with a wet rupture and vanished.
Eva turned to Leo with anguish hollowing her features. “No matter how I tried — how I pleaded — the curse devoured Mother from within as it now devours me.”
The fog seethed again. New phantasms swirled into focus and cycled faster and faster. A younger Eva spooned nourishment into her mother’s slack and drooling mouth. Eva herself strapped to a gurney, eyes soulless voids, reacting not at all as orderlies plunged needles brutally into wasted flesh.
“This fate I dread above all.” Despair wracked Eva’s voice. “You’ll remember only this ghost that remains after the rest of me has faded.”
As the visions tortured Eva, Leo came up and clutched her. He searched his heart for words to anchor her spirit, but all he could choke out was, “I’m here, Ma. I’m right here with you.”
It seemed pitifully small in the face of her torment. He had no powers to combat the curse; no lofty vows to break the vise-grip. Only his hand gripping hers through the horrors as one human being to another.
As Eva collapsed against him, Leo enveloped her form. Hot tears spilled down his cheeks, and they clung together like survivors of a shipwreck as the storm raged around them.
He stroked her hair and repeated the only truth that mattered: “You are not alone. I’m here with you. I will always be right here with you.”
At this, the phantoms dissolved. In their wake stood an ancient, splintered door. Iron chains dangled from its jagged edges, broken. Blinding white light poured from the cracks and keyhole — so brilliant it seemed liquid.
Eva returned Leo’s gaze with love and trust shining in her amber eyes. She stood and threaded her fingers through his. Together, they pushed open the heavy door.
Light flooded out to swallow the darkness. They passed through the portal and into the radiance beyond.
Stepping through, Leo threw up his hands against the sudden brilliance blazing from an invisible orb floating above them.
Gradually, his vision adjusted to see Eva seated on a simple wooden chair. She appeared neither as the young guide nor the fire-seared mother. Rather, Leo saw Eva suspended in fluid beauty outside of mortality’s grasp.
She returned his smile with such knowing that worlds unfolded silently between them. No words existed sufficiently enough for this space, so he knelt before her and sought only the benediction of her gaze.
Eva cupped his face with a mother’s loving touch. And though she spoke no words, an understanding beyond language poured into his heart. No matter the extent of madness or failure of the body or loss of precious memories, she knew him. She loved him. She would choose him forever across all realities.
Leo shook. How long had he raged against her dying light alone? And yet no doctor, lawyer, insurance specialist, or holy man could explain the terrible sacrifice asked of those who loved the afflicted. Only his mother herself, who returned from the abyss, could give him the answers.
She drew him close, so his head rested upon the comforting swell of her belly like he was a child again. He exhaled and felt a lifetime of sadness leaving in one prolonged sigh.
No matter that her voice might never shape his name again or that she might recoil from him in abject terror tomorrow, she had already whispered the timeless promise no disease could steal.
They stood. Leo wiped his eyes clear so that he could burn into memory the quiet rapture of her face in this place between the worlds.
He saw the shining young guide woven through the intricate tapestry of Eva’s being. She traced a glowing sigil on his forehead, which sank through flesh into his soul. There it would remain seared into every conception of himself until all was finally, blissfully unwoven and understood after some unimaginable end.
She cradled his face in her hands, and whispered, “I will meet you there, my star.” She kissed his forehead gently, like a blessing, before stepping back. Then she turned away and transversed a bridge extending to realms hidden by the glare.
But before she faded from view, she looked back one last time. And despite oceans of darkness and light interposing inexorably between them, stretched thin by years and sickness, Leo knew they would meet again beyond life’s trammeled ways, purified in pain’s crucible, and to love’s ultimate measure.
For now, it felt less like goodbye than it did gratitude…and hope.
The morning sun glinted off the placid surface of Echo Lake, scattering shards of light that made Leo squint as he gazed out over the familiar waters.
Despite the years, he never forgot the summers from his childhood when his family would picnic on the grassy banks of this lake. His mother’s famous macaroni salad, the sound of his father’s laughter, the sight of the family dog splashing along the shoreline. Those memories dwelled within Leo even as the woman who bore him slipped further away.
Leo glanced down at his mother. She stared ahead with a blank expression, seeing and yet unseeing.
Taking her by the hand, he said, “Come on, Ma. Your favorite spot awaits.”
Eva looked up and blinked, vacant-eyed, before allowing herself to be led along the dirt path, one unsteady step at a time. How many years had it been since she last visited this place? Leo didn’t have the heart to count them.
In her prime, his mother radiated a joy that could fill ten rooms. Now she wandered through the remnants of her days, fragile as a snowflake, no longer tethered to the world.
As they walked on, Leo felt a swell of tenderness for this woman; this vessel who had birthed and shaped him through all his years. She, who had once tenderly guided his first awkward steps, now relied fully on him to guide her way. Though her body remained healthy enough, the terrible disease continued its relentless progression through her mind. A skittish stranger with the wondering eyes of a child had replaced his stalwart, quick-witted woman.
On days when coherence briefly returned like a long-lost friend, she would clutch Leo desperately and whisper, “Soon I will forget I ever had a son.”
When he first arrived back home, the darkness suffused Eva’s home in the shadows and prowled the corners like the mangy creatures he witnessed in the Circles. But, now, their teeth no longer tore so savagely at Leo’s psyche. For, in bearing witness to his mother’s anguish, Leo had illuminated the deepest recesses where the sickness dwelled.
In the few years since he moved in, he had armored himself against that darkness. He understood on some primal level that the woman toddling beside him now was but a temporary garment; that beneath it lay the endless spirit who had nurtured him lifetime after lifetime and circle after circle.
Death was not the end. He would find her again across the threshold.
They reached a small grove of oak trees offering welcome patches of shade amidst the burgeoning summer heat. Eva stared up at the rustling leaves with a smile playing about her lips.
Then she turned toward Leo, placed a palm on his cheek, and spoke a single word resonant with recognition:
“Son.”
Emotion clogged Leo’s throat. He placed his hand over hers.
“I’m here, Ma.”
Sighing contentedly, Eva shuffled toward a grassy spot — her old spot — overlooking the lake. She seated herself awkwardly, with one leg folded beneath her slight frame, and spread out her floral skirt.
Humming softly, she gathered Leo close. His head rested upon the comforting swell of her belly like he was a boy again. Anchored by her guardian-like presence, Leo allowed his focus to follow the dance of sunlight on the rippling water.
For now, no illness existed. For now, there was only this perfect moment.
Eventually, Leo felt Eva stir. Her gentle ministrations trailed away. Lifting his head, he saw curiosity kindle like a flame behind her bright gaze.
She pushed herself to her feet with unexpected agility and made for the shallow edge of the lake. Leo let her go without resistance.
At the muddy bank, Eva hitched up her skirt and stepped one shaking foot into the cloudy shallows. She leaned down intently as if observing some wonder invisible to mortal eyes.
Then faint snatches of song floated back toward Leo: simple hymns recalling her girlhood years.
Leo approached the bank where she swayed gracefully with her face in the sun. He drank in the beautiful spectacle of this woman singing and humming while playfully skimming the lake’s shallows.
Tears pricked his eyes at this unexpected moment. Time’s inexorable passage had not completely stolen the anchor line of her soul, even if her days of full coherence were now gone.
He lowered himself onto the grassy bank. Turning to him with sudden lucidity, Eva regarded her son anew with eyes full of innocent wonder. Then she spoke the only words left that held any real meaning:
“I will meet you there, my star.”
And Leo understood.
When the last call came for his mother’s spirit to shed its earthly raiment, she would know him beyond all bounds of flesh or memory or reason. He will find her waiting in that land where pure essence never forgot itself, bathed in the light of love unfolding through endless seasons, patient and renewing.
Under the sparkling sun, Leo opened his arms to the woman who had guided him through her uncountable Circles. She offered him the smile of the innocent girl she once was.
And for now, that was enough.
