We were in France (and I think I was about 12 at the time). My sisters and I were asleep in the room, and my parents came in after midnight — they’d had a couple of drinks with the other grown-ups after we had gone to our room.
They probably had too much wine, and at some point my mom sat down in the wrong way on the toilet seat, and it broke. She fell on the ground, and she had a bad bruise as a consequence, but that was only a minor detail. Because then she started crying.
My sisters did not hear a thing, but I was alarmed (especially by her falling in the bathroom at first), and I knew exactly why she was crying — why she had been crying so much in the last year.
Her mother had died the year before, and the pain was just too much.
On a Friday near the end of April, we had received a phone call, and although it was finally Summer, my mom did not react the way she usually reacted on Summer phone calls. Her mom had collapsed while trying to lift my grandfather back in bed after a fall. The aneurysm had burst, and my grandmother died one week later.
(I wish she could read what I am writing now. Without the aneurysm. Or that fatal Friday.)
So my mother was crying now, in a hotel bed, almost one year later.
And all I could do was listen, and deeply recognize the tears.
Because my grandmother had disappeared.
(And I could not find her.)