Hush

The sound of loss and the flicker that remains

The shrill ring of my phone splits the dark.

4:13 a.m.

A woman’s voice enters my ear:

“Your mother has died… She went in her sleep… Would you like to come see her… Her things are here…”

Her words dissolve into static.

I press end.

Silence fills the room.

Only Simba’s labored breathing moves inside it.

I rise, drifting down the stairs.

In the kitchen, I glance right and stop. A light flickers, a quiet rhythm inside the hush. I walk through the doorway into the sitting room.

Pulse.

Pulse.

Pulse.

Pulse.

My hand finds the switch on the wall. Off. Yet the ceiling light keeps blinking, steady as a heartbeat.

Beep.

Beep.

Beep.

Beep.

The smoke detector joins in - a symphony of my mother’s death, playing just for me.

I sink onto the sofa, staring upward. Transfixed.

Before she died, I had asked her:

“Do you think you’ll find a way to reach me, once you’re gone?”

Now the answer flickers above me.

Pulse.

Beep.

Pulse.

Beep.

“And then there was just me,” I whisper to the house that raised me.

It had always been the three of us: my dad, my mom, and me.

MY parents. The ones who belonged to me.

Who loved me. Who worried for me. Who supported me. Who nagged me.

My constants.

Now both gone.

I wished for tears, but they too had left.

I sit in the silence. The house sits with me, holding its breath, as if it knows what was lost.

Pulse.

Beep.

Pulse.

Beep.

I know, without knowing how to name it, that something new is unfolding.

A life truly alone.

No one left to love me…in that way.

The light keeps flickering, steady.

Her way of keeping her promise.

A happy birthday wish to me, just one day early.

✨ Author’s Note: What you’ve just read is about the night my mother died. The hospital called at 4:13 a.m. The next day was 3/14, my birthday.

I can’t shake the mirror of those numbers. It felt like her last way of reminding me that even in death, she is stitched into my beginning.