The night before Sherry's funeral, Tristan was crying and crying in the bath. The water was too cold. Or too hot. One of those, definitely.
I washed him as fast as possible. Then I toweled him dry, still sobbing, pulled on his flannel pajamas, and tucked him into my bed. I asked if he wanted to read our hospice books again. His head and the thumb he was sucking nodded. We read a story about the little elf with a candle in his hat whose grandpa died. Then he turned out the light, and we watched the stars.
It was one of those winter nights when the stars are so bright that the sky seems bumpy and textured. Every now and then a plane would crawl across our field of view, and its lights seemed feeble. The bowl of the Big Dipper was framed perfectly in the window, bright blue. Because of the mullions we could see that it was slowly rotating around the north star, out of sight beyond the bedroom wall. Tristan watched and sucked his thumb.
Out of the quiet he said, "Mom, when stars explode they turn into a neutron star or a black hole."
"That's true."
"Nothing is permanent, Mom. Even the stars die."
2 comments:
The truth is so raw. Big hugs from aunt Sam.
Indeed. Equally interesting to me is that other than that whole matter-to-energy thing matter is forever. Albeit changing form all the time.
The atoms that we're made of have been around since the beginning of the universe. We're all very old.
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