A Passage Through Shadows

A Passage Through Shadows

The map on the passenger seat quivered with each gust that slithered through the open window—thin autumn wind, smelling faintly of wheat stubble and diesel. I steered Josie west, toward a bruised horizon, the dashboard clock fixed on an early evening November hour that felt neither here nor there. Twilight was sliding in; day kept its promise to leave. Somewhere behind me, a hospice nurse was measuring morphine in teaspoons, and my sister was counting heartbeats that stuttered more than they beat. My mom had been granted “days, perhaps a week,” the sort of forecast that lands like a dull axe: you know the blow is coming, yet the mind refuses to picture the blade.

I drove on anyway.

She told me to.

“Keep going, Brock,” she’d rasped into the phone, each syllable ferried across a sea of static and shallow breaths. “Finish what you started. Don’t circle back to watch me fade away.”

There was a fierceness in that whisper. She had always been a woman who met the world at full draw—no warning shots, no half-measures. If life squared up for a fight, she tightened the strap on her purse and joined the melee, swinging words like iron. More warrior than nurturer, yes, but it was a brand of love as raw and trustworthy as barbed-wire fence: you leaned on it, you bled, and you never questioned its strength.

Now the warrior was shrinking—lungs invaded by three separate rebellions of cell and marrow, bones riddled, appetite a rumor. My sister described her voice like a candle about to gutter out: flame flinching, wick glowing soft red, wax pooling for the last time. I pictured hospice sunlight falling across quilts, morphine syringes lined like slender soldiers on a nightstand, and the hush that collects when everyone has said what can be said.

She had always been a woman who met the world at full draw—no warning shots, no half-measures. If life squared up for a fight, she tightened the strap on her purse and joined the melee.

A man expects to bury his parents. But expectation doesn’t keep grief from prowling the corridors of the mind, sniffing out the soft spots. Dad died years ago; the wound scarred over into an ache that only flares on Christmas mornings and random Thursdays. Now Mom was slipping toward him, and I would soon wear the title orphan. It sounds absurd in a grown-up mouth, but the word doesn’t age out. It simply waits in the wings for the second parent to fall, then walks onstage and bows.

The road unspooled ahead—two gray lanes stitched through sorghum stubble and pastures gone blond. I’d envisioned this “Hope & Generosity Tour” as a pilgrimage: three months of backroads, coffee counters, and front-porch confessions, hunting the ordinary saints who keep small-town America from blowing away. I had found them, too—Michaela with her kennel of rescues, Grandma Gloria reading alphabet cards to kindergartners, Tom and Peg shepherding a town of 130 through bake sales and Rock-A-Thons. Their stories filled my notebooks like spring runoff fills creek beds. But death has a way of rewriting itineraries.

I pulled off at a lonely turnout overlooking a Kansas wheat field newly turned to stubble—earth dark, furrows straight as moral plumb lines. Josie ticked and cooled. High above, a V of geese rowed south, their calls falling like questions I couldn’t answer.

I thought about the last real visit with Mom, a month earlier when Bren and I detoured to my boyhood home for my fiftieth high school reunion. She’d sat propped in her recliner, oxygen tubing looping over a jumble of blankets. But her eyes were sharp, the brown of fresh-broken pecan shells, and the mind behind them sharper still. We reminisced about the "good old days," stories flowing like familiar rivers carving through ancient canyons. There was comfort in those shared histories, a temporary suspension of the inevitable.

She was smaller that day—bones like driftwood, skin papery, but the voice still carried iron filings. That was her: make the angel of death wait on the porch while she finished the punchline.

Now the punch line hovered unfinished. I had miles to drive, profiles to gather, promises to keep. She ordered me to keep the engine humming. She wanted me to remember her as she was when we last visited, no wasting away until death took her.

She was smaller that day—bones like driftwood, skin papery, but the voice still carried iron filings. That was her: make the angel of death wait on the porch while she finished the punchline.

Night divided the plains into two shades of black: earth and sky. I sat on the van’s bumper, listening to corn leaves rattle like gossip in the wind. Grief slipped its leash and padded closer.

I tried to picture a world without her voice. Harder than you’d think. For sixty-plus years her commentary had narrated my life—sometimes as drill sergeant, sometimes as lawyer for the defense, and occasionally as comic relief. Even in silence I could hear her: “Stand up straight. Hold the door. Keep a spare twenty in your wallet for emergencies.” When that voice falls silent forever, what echo replaces it?

The stars answered by igniting, one by one, ancient fires burning billions of years just to flicker above a Kansas pull-off. I realized grief and starlight share a trait: each began long before I noticed, and each will outlast my noticing.

Morning came dressed in damp fog. I brewed coffee on the camp stove, watched steam swirl away, and dialed the number I both dreaded and needed. My sister answered on the second ring. Her voice sounded like crepe paper: fragile, purposeful.

“She’s still with us,” she whispered. “Sleeping mostly. Breathing’s shallow.”

I asked if she read Mom the blog posts I was writing—little vignettes from the road, stories of strangers’ kindness.

“Read every word,” Sis said. “She smiled at the dog-rescue one. I think she mouthed ‘good girl.’”

Silence puddled between us. I heard a monitor beep, an air-conditioner hum.

“Keep writing,” she said. “It helps.”

Helps who? I wondered but didn’t ask. Maybe it no longer mattered.

Miles later, in a café that smelled of bacon and floor polish, I opened the notebook and tried to write Mom into the margins of other people’s stories. Maybe the profiles I’d been gathering were portrait fragments of the woman who raised me. Maybe I’d been circling back to her all along.

The realization loosened something—the knot where sorrow and gratitude tangled. Tears came, surprising and clean, dribbling into black diner coffee. No one noticed; if they did, they left me that kindness. When the cup was empty, so was the knot. Not gone, but slackened enough for breath.

Days slid by measured in county signs. Missouri became Oklahoma, Oklahoma bled into Arkansas. One dawn outside West Helena, Arkansas, my phone lit before sunrise. I felt the vibration in my bones. My sister texted: “She’s gone.”

Two words. A door slammed—no, not slammed; shut with soft finality. I pulled Josie onto the gravel shoulder, killed the engine, waited for the emptiness to roar. It didn’t. Instead, a calm spread—wider than sorrow, older than me. The plains accepted one more grain of dust. Somewhere a nurse folded sheets, a chart was closed, morphine locked away. The warrior laid down her purse.

Grief doesn’t end; it changes address.

Grief doesn’t end; it changes address. Some days it camps on the porch, gentle and reminiscent. Others, it breaks in through the screen door and rummages the kitchen for old arguments, unanswered questions. But it travels lighter when mixed with purpose, and purpose is what she’d assigned me.

I stopped at a roadside stand outside Birmingham, bought a sack of peaches just because she adored them. Gave them to the next family I met—a single dad juggling night shifts and Little-League fees. Told him they were from my mother. Didn’t explain further; didn’t need to. He took them the way the hungry take bread: with astonishment that bread still exists.

Miles later I realized that simple act—passing sweetness forward—was the perfect memorial. No headstone required, just continued motion of kindness seeded, fruit shared, hope kept alive in small, ordinary gestures.

Night again. Camped beside a lake, crickets sawing the dark, I scribble this final note by lantern glow:

She taught me to fight for myself, to speak, to keep moving. She taught me to stand between younger kids and older bullies, between justice and indifference. Dying, she taught me one more lesson: that love sometimes looks like letting go, trusting the road to finish the story.

One day I’ll drive home, carve words into eulogy, hold Bren, and bury a warrior. Then I’ll climb back into Josie, point her toward the next unknown town shimmering on a two-lane ribbon, and keep the promise:

Find the goodness.
Tell the tale.
Swing the purse if you have to.