*A Brow, Unfurrowed

[That night . . . ] Mum’s face had drastically begun to change. This woman who started out a gorgeous model (often mistaken for actress Farrah Fawcett), a David Bowie impersonator, then famed paranormal investigator, lived her last years with a face hardened by the guilt she held within and affected by the substances she used to try and forget it. She’d gone full circle.

“Look. Her face has no wrinkles at all, it’s totally smooth,” my younger sister Kelli said. I agreed, although I didn’t particularly want to as I was reminded of the only detail Mum had revealed to me of my grandmother’s death the day she had passed many years before. I hadn’t seen that brow un-furrowed since I was five.

We decided to tell her these details in case she could hear us. We spoke aloud to her the entire night. Sometimes I’d look up above me so that if her soul was hovering over us, as I’d heard from countless accounts of near death experiences, she could see my face and could know I loved her and that I really was smart and paid attention to what folks said about the afterlife (a last-ditch effort at impressing the unimpressionable).

“See Mum, see. I do love you.”

Excerpt from chapter one | wild horses |Everything’s Hunky Dory: A Memoir