after. lengthening. sorrow.
After sorrowing, after the last gasps of suffering, then there is simply silence. Vast as the night sky.
In the month since my mother’s death, I have brooded over her final days – remembering the fog of her slow withdrawal, the words spoken in crumbs, the waning of appetite and desire.
In the midst of these silent recollections, absorbing the full force of her dying, I’ve found myself exactly at the point of giving birth to an endeavor of my own. illoominata is a business, a social enterprise, a website, my whole life’s labor culminating in one stroke of passion. illoominata is about the light of women’s hands and imagination woven/stitched/dyed into cloth. It’s about hand-loomed luxury, beauty spun from the earth, a world-wide web of women-of-the-cloth rising into creative and financial independence. My mother loved this work I had conceived. I know it is time to bring it forth.
My mother was also a woman of the cloth. She sewed my every dress as a child, even when I begged for storebought; she tailored her own masterful suits and could still slip into their silk-lined size 4 at the end of her life; she sat me on a stool at the fabric store to pour over patterns when I was too young to even read. She led me to beauty with a thread.
Lying in the foggy dark, one evening recently, a star appeared in my sky. A familiar image of my mother came to me; far-off, but luminous. She is a young adult, at the time of her own pregnancies and fullness of powers. She has been returned, it seems, to her essence, as though she has come through a long arduous passage and been given back the flash of her smile, flickering through the wide dark sky. In that moment, I realize that her last days are lifted. They are over. Who she is with me now is something new.
After the death of one we love, some people are visited in dreams. Others feel presences. I found my mother in the silent sky. She is a part of my constellation. She shines without fear as I step onto the path of illoominata; she lights my way. Even this, even this, even this; she reminds me, even the darkness is illuminated.
And a star flares out, shattering the silent sky.
Susan
Stephanie
A Still Life...A Life Still 
What a beautiful young woman. So full of hope, life and expectation. May I be remembered in the way you remember her. Woman of the cloth…Like mother, like daughter.
Beth
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