The End of Summer

("How Should We Mourn the End of Summer?")

My wife is knee deep in going through my mother in law's life in photographs, in letters, in scraps of paper saved in drawers and closets. This apartment now silent except for the hours each day my wife spends sifting through its contents.

From  the day in late June my sister entered the hospital and remained there for almost four weeks, coming home only on the day she would pass, to her funeral the next week,  followed almost immediately by my mother in law's final decline and her death two weeks ago, this summer has treated my family with unrelenting harshness.

I now mourn the loss of this season, not its end. For I never felt its warmth on my face, never got sand between my toes, never sat beneath a starlit sky or experienced thunder and lightning race across my universe. For me, it has been a blur of hospital rooms and hospital beds, of speaking of what was and trying to avoid what is, of eulogies and memories of better days.

There are precious few whispers of summer remaining. Recently I came upon the first tree whose leaves were harbinger for what waits just over the horizon.

I love summer and everything it means. But not one that has delivered only sadness and loss. And a million photos stuffed in every nook and cranny of an apartment now without an occupant.