except ovenbird When my grandmother died I wasn’t there. I was four thousand kilometers away. My father and his siblings and my cousins and my brother gathered around her hospital bed as she lived out her final moments. A few days prior she had fallen and hit her head causing a brain bleed. The doctors couldn’t fix it. It never fails to astound me how many things can’t be fixed. Initially it looked as though she would live. When things turned, they turned fast, and I didn’t have time to fly home. So I wasn’t there. “Was it peaceful?” I asked my father. It wasn’t. “She was so agitated and distressed,” my father said and he seemed haunted. At the funeral people did the awkward dance they do around death and tried to find a silver lining, no matter how tarnished. People kept approaching my aunts and uncles to say how sorry they were and they would say, “everyone was there with her when she died” and then my dad would chime in and say, “except A.” This ritual was repeated dozens of times. “We were all there! Well, everyone except for A.” I felt a new grief layering itself on top of the grief I was already carrying. I didn’t get there in time. I missed my grandmother’s last breaths. I didn’t get to hold her hand. She didn’t get to place her mother’s engagement ring on my finger (this gift was given to me later by my father). I know what my father was doing. He wanted me to know that I counted. “Everyone” was NOT there, because I’m a “someone”, a someone that was important to my grandmother, and I wasn’t there. He was trying to say that he hadn’t forgotten about me; that “everyone” was not the truth of it. But all I could hear was a painful accusation—I wasn’t there. I should have been there but I wasn’t there and that’s because I made this life altering decision to move to the west coast where you can’t easily swing by a hospital room in Ontario where your grandmother is dying. I hear the echo still. Every holiday, every momentous occasion, every summer barbecue, every pool party: everyone was there…except me. 251206 ... ancasa.reyn when i got the word that my mother died ten years ago i was lying on my back on my couch trying to sleep while struggling with severe pain in my lower leg caused by having aggravated a back injury from more than thirty years prior at the time i couldn't sit up for more than five minutes i crawled from room to room but most of the time i lay on my back there was zero chance i was going to be able to sit for twenty minutes in a car to get to the airport then for another hour or two at the airport then for four more hours on a plane another forty minutes from that airport to my brother's house and all of the other sitting a funeral would demand of me so all my mom's sons except for me were there to witness her casket being lowered into the ground when asked where i was my youngest brother responded oh, you know p 251206 what's it to you? who go blather from