https://www.joinobit.com//obituaries/8644-heavenly-alpha-centauri-windsor-mountbatten-1958_07_22-2026_04_25
27 April 2026.
Mama is gone. I searched for her yesterday, in the all-absorbing white light, this version of heaven I’ve always envisioned. I imagined some part of her would remain here, tokens of her found in bird song and breeze. But at night, as I lay in bed, imagining her essence crossing into eternity, forcing illusory fuchsia optics to decorate the darkness, as much as I tried to envision her in this dream, I could not erase the awareness of a certain absence.
Mama is gone. She is not here. I cannot feel her anywhere. And all that I’ve believed about the end is different now. In this version, death is final, and pragmatic, and natural.
Her body is still at the hospital, grafts of skin and eyes and other parts aside from her organs, which are not usable anymore, are being harvested to help someone else. But her spirit—it did not stay here a moment longer. And why would it? After the life she experienced, if given the chance to escape it all, why wouldn’t she choose that release, that final freedom?
In bursts of intermittent grief and relief, I wonder what I could have done differently. I would have liked to hold her hand in her final breaths, if she wanted me there. I would have liked to eat fried chicken with her one more time, and maybe my son would be there too, and he would hear her laugh in person, and only know her as that, not the way I knew her, as someone the opposite of laughter. I grieve the person and the dream.
I’m arranging for her disposition, alone. My sister wants no part of it. She has built a fortress of boundaries around her that hardly anyone can penetrate. And my Dad has yet to learn of his ex-wife’s passing. Likely, the reality will frighten him, will shake the ideas he has about his own vitality and mortality. But when I receive the ashes and am holding Mama’s remains, I wonder if I will still feel this absence. Will a hint of her spirit still be there, one I can usher into the great mysteriousness, or will it just be a vessel filled with the dust of bone?
