A Late Arrival at DIA

She died on a Tuesday. While I was on a plane, flying home to say goodbye. While my mother waited for me in the airport parking lot.

When I got to the red Durango at passenger pickup, we embraced. Then, my mother said, “We’re too late Courtni.”

“What? What? What? When? No!” but I knew. She was gone. We were too late.

Our tangled, tear-stricken bodies descended to the pavement. The car door remained open, my suitcase unattended. And we cried together on the curb.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I wailed, and suddenly, I felt I made my mother miss the final moments.

“No,” my mom rejected my apology. “It was what she wanted, she didn't want us there,” she said, and I guess we’ll never know. “I told her to wait until Tuesday; I just didn't give her a time.”

When I boarded, she was alive. When I landed, she wasn't. How come I didn’t see her soul ascend to heaven from 10,000 feet above? I missed her by a little over an hour.

From the airport, we went to the hospice. I became a frightened child in the sterile halls, my hand tightly gripping that of my mother’s, as we went to see the dead body of her own mother.

Each door we passed I cringed, scared and knowing we were getting closer and closer to the name tag “Virginia Mantello.” Closer and closer to realizing she was gone.

Her mouth was open, gaping, her cheeks sunken it. Still, as a picture, we moved slowly around her as if time stopped. All the wrinkles were gone, a face swollen with death. Her hair was combed, parted, wrong, sweet like a silver child angel.

My mother put her head to my Grandma’s shoulder, tears and whispers landing on her mother’s neck. For a moment, I’m taken aback – I can’t help but think about my own probable future – the moment I’ll be hugging my own dead mother’s body, minutes after her soul leaves this world.

It’s one of those moments you grow up a whole lot of bit in just a little bit, realizing one day, your mother will die, realizing today, your mother lost her mother.

We live, we love, we lose, we leave. That is the reality. It’s the price we pay for being human.