Page 41

“Oh, I’m so sorry, Audrey.” Sandra’s voice is tender, her expression caring. “It’s especially tragic when a person takes their own life, isn’t it? But sometimes depression is a fatal disease.”

Her words catch me off guard. Though I understand, of course, that my mother suffered from depression, dying always seemed like a choice she made. It was an idea reinforced by the psychologist Dad took me to, who spent most of our time coaching me in forgiveness. But children who lose a mom to illness or accident aren’t expected to forgive their parent. As much as I was undone by my dad’s death, I never blamed him for getting sick. As grievously as I miss David, I don’t resent him for catching Covid.

I try the idea on for size. Instead of choosing suicide, Mom succumbed to a fatal mental illness. The reframing changes everything. Death wasn’t a selfish decision on her part. Rather, her sick brain bamboozled her into believing the world she left behind would be a brighter place without her in it.

“I have to lie back down.”

“Of course, Audrey,” Sandra says. “Take all the time you need.”

Flat on my back, I gaze up at patches of blue peeking through rustling leaves. A poem by Robert Frost that I recited in high school English class pops into my mind, its eight lines etched in my memory by the many times I practiced speaking it:

Why make so much of fragmentary blue,

In here and there a bird, or butterfly,

Or flower, or wearing-stone, or open eye,

When heaven presents in sheets the solid hue?

Since earth is earth, perhaps, not heaven (as yet)–

Though some savants make earth include the sky;

And blue so far above us comes so high,

It only gives our wish for blue a whet.

I’ve imagined David’s soul as a white cloud looking down on me with love. Now I picture the blue sky as a vast eye above those snow-covered dunes, watching over my mother’s final sleep.

“I’m okay now, Sandra, thanks.” I manage to get to my feet without falling down. Together, we extinguish the torches and carry the massage table to her car, both of us lost in our own thoughts. After helping Sandra load her Honda Fit, I say, “I’m sure I owe you more than a few books for the all the treatments you’ve given me.”

“Now that you mention it,” she says, closing the hatchback, “I was wondering how you’d feel about me seeing other clients here until I’m allowed to reopen. I’ve got a screened tent I could set up by your pond, if that’s okay with you.”

“I guess one more tent won’t make a difference,” I say, glancing back at the encampment of cyclists.

“Wonderful, thank you. Now, you need to drink lots of water or herbal tea, but no alcohol for at least a week. Do you keep a dream journal?”

I picture the notebook on my nightstand. “I could.”

“It’s a good practice for processing the emotions that arise during a session.”

After Sandra drives away, the cyclists invite me to join them around their evening fire. I decline, going instead to the barn for a 1923 first edition of Robert Frost’s New Hampshire that I recently listed. I leaf through its deckle-edged pages while eating my microwaved dinner. After rereading “Fragmentary Blue,” I skim some of the short poems Frost called “Grace Notes.” I’m so taken with “Dust of Snow” I recite it aloud:

The way a crow

Shook down on me

The dust of snow

From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart

A change of mood

And saved some part

Of a day I had rued.