Mother's Well Kept Lie

Not even on her death bed. Even then she gave nothing away. I watched her wither away quietly, staring out of her bedroom window with neither a gleam of nostalgia or hope in her eye. From time to time, she’d ask for a sip of water. Maybe a bit of ice. Something to satisfy her. The deathbed is not a place for charity so what could I have expected her to give. Answers? Explanations? Clues? The letters were all that I had of her. Secreted away in small beach bag line with what appeared to be wax paper. I poured through them to find some sense of her. Hundreds of them beginning a year before my birth, the spanned forty years, the last one written only days before she collapsed. Sealed, addressed, and stamped but never mailed, she wrote tirelessly to her “Dear Luther,” a man I never knew existed but apparently constituted my mother’s entire world.