While my sister spoke to me over the telephone, I spied a smudge on the kitchen counter and assiduously swiped at it clockwise and anti-clockwise with a dishcloth.
I guess I was hearing her words but hadn't yet made sense of what she'd said.
My mom is in the ICU. She may need to go on a ventilator. She may have had a heart attack. All of this still sounds unreal. She was just here two days ago, being her usual self.
Before my sister's call, I had started today's post with this: The gentle, brilliant spoken-word poet Andrea Gibson, who died yesterday, once wrote “In the end I want my heart to be covered in stretch marks.” And I too want to stretch my heart wide with love and what it means to be human and alive and brave. But I can't handle the thought of my mom struggling to breathe.