The simple story of it is that, while walking along the wood line that ran beside our house, a tree that had been there for many years fell on her. It had been struck by lightning in a storm a few weeks before, which damaged it horribly. The tree was most likely killed by the lightning strike, but we had no real way of knowing. It had been torn and mangled by the strike, but seemed to be still rooted to its spot. Mother had been enjoying a bright, sunny spring day with a simple walk on our property. There was a light breeze in the air and the trees were swaying gently as she strolled by. Amity, who was 15 at that time, and I were locked away in our computer lab, working on a custom operating system that we’d both dreamed up. We were blissfully unaware of the world outside of our hut.
Until we heard the massive, ground-shaking thud of the tree as it fell.
We both went outside to investigate, immediately saw the tree and went to it. We were still some thirty yards away before we saw the lower half of our mother’s body protruding from the fallen oak tree, her top half entirely covered by the dead monstrosity.
It was a closed-casket funeral, attended by only a handful of mournful family members whom I barely knew but were kind enough to keep up the charade that she was my wife and not actually my mother, even though they all knew the truth. Our family’s masquerade with Society had to be maintained, after all. I have no idea who was related to who or how, but I did notice this: Amity was the only child present.
Suddenly I was 34, alone with a 17-year-old daughter, and I was completely and utterly lost. Amity, though, was a beacon during my months-long, painful night of suffering.
Time passed slowly after Mother Rose had died and although I missed her terribly every day, I had eventually learned how to live without her. Amity had helped through that process by stoically taking care of the house while I struggled through the stupor of grief. That whole time, which lasted a good 5 months, I felt like I was living under water, my thoughts were sluggish and it always felt difficult to breathe in a weird way. Not physically breathe, of course, but mentally and emotionally. I didn’t laugh, didn’t work in the lab, didn’t do much of anything except wallow in my own self-pity and despair. One day, though, I just snapped out it. The pain and grief were still there, but some sort of switch in my head had suddenly been flipped and I rejoined my daughter in the Land of the Living. It was slow-going at first and Amity never pushed. She simply did her best to accentuate the positive and cherish any time we spent together. When I needed time alone, she gave it to me and when I needed to be around her, she celebrated in it.
It wasn’t long after I’d come out of my fugue that I realized Amity had to have gone through her own measure of it. She never showed it to me. Certainly, after our mother had died, she was as grief-stricken as I, but she somehow managed to bounce back from it and picked up where her mother had left off- tidying up the house, cooking, cleaning and all of the other household chores that Mother attended to with seeming effortlessness. I’d had my head buried up my own backside for so long that I didn’t even notice it. Until I did. And then I deeply apologized, which she accepted with grace and explained that it wasn’t necessary.
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