and then, once again, there were none . . .

in which the proverbial nest is emptied again, and once again there comes an aching

Hollow is the word that’s haunting me. Filling my pores and my lungs. Catching me quick. Sneaking up from behind.

Silence is the sound that comes with hollow.

Absence.

There are no footsteps down the stairs. No creak from the floorboards above me. The neat row of shoes at the back door is, well, neat. Not a jumble.

If you walk past the room at the bend in the stairs, you can—for the first time in weeks—see the actual floor. Not the tumble of clothes that often serve as cushion—or death trap.

Once again, our old house is hollowed. Hollowed of its summer slumberers: the ones who stayed here for weeks on end, for their own places to lay their heads weren’t yet ready. So they laid their heads here. Tricked little old me into thinking we were back in the old days—only minus the packing of lunches and annual trips to the pediatrician.

For a couple weeks there, the two I bore into this world were both here, together—their otherwise homelessness overlapping. For that fine stretch of days there were occasional dinners for four, without it being Christmas or Passover. Just any old Tuesday. Sheets on beds were askew. Duffel bags and blankets and assorted apartment accoutrement were stuffed in the living room. And the fridge was emptying at astonishing rates. I was making at least once-a-day trips to the market.

I was breathing in bliss.

Now, not so much.

The hollow and the silence and the blanket of calm (much as that latter is needed) have tapped open a layer of grief, plain and simple. Oh, I know this grief is of the wimpiest sort (and transient; it will slip away soon enough), and I feel more than guilty for calling it that (certainly in the face of ones I love whose lives have been shattered in the shadow of this past year with grief of the deepest kind).

But a loss is a loss, and letting go is always, always hard. At least for me it always has been.

The thing about grief, the thing a wise someone somewhere along the line once taught me, is that grief never wholly leaves. It dissolves, yes, but the grains of it are there, settling somewhere down along the pit of our soul maybe. There must be layers and layers of it by the time you’ve clocked a few decades. (And I’ve clocked a few and then some…) I’ve got griefs that left behind grains so big I could break a toe if I bumped into them. And I’ve got ones maybe more the size of a rice grain. Or salt before it’s dissolved. There are sediments of all sizes dozing away down there.

Until they’re not.

Until something awakes them. Stirs them from their long slumbers and rattles the cages.

That’s when it hurts again. Makes you feel just a little bit dizzy. Makes you want to weep while you’re scrubbing the very few plates that constitute all you need for the two of you.

The inevitable, undeniable truth is that as each page turns, you’re closer to the end. And I just can’t shake that feeling. Though already I can hear the voices of those who tell me I’m wack. I take these things too hard, too operatically.

Maybe grief is one of the first senses to come rushing in because I live so deep in the shadow of it. I’ve not shaken the truth that this damn cancer has pushed me onto thinner ice than I’d choose. And my long weeks and months in its mightiest grip made me see with utter and absolute clarity what matters most to my heart. Plain and simple, it’s time with my boys. They’re the ones who inject joy into my every day; they’re the ones whose worries keep me awake at night (for I also cannot shake the notion that my No. 1 Job is to fix whatever I can for whatever breaks in their lives—even, especially, their hearts. And, yes, I know the folly in that. Let me know if you find the secret for decoupling the crisscrossed wiring that crisscrosses all of us).

If any role in my life is one I’d call holy, it’s being a mother. No other anything I’ve ever done more mightily yanks on more threads of me, demands the selflessness, the mercy, the turning-the-other-cheek than mothering. In so many ways it seems the crucible to the holiness I aim to crawl toward.

So once again the insides of me are shaken like a snow globe, and the odd lumps of old grief and new grief and medium-aged grief haven’t yet drifted back down to their quieter state. Plain and simple, I am not only missing my boys, but seeing clearly my place on my timeline. And I know I’m farther along than I wish I was. I love every morsel of this whole blessed life—even the hard parts. I don’t want it to end. Not yet anyway.

Having that duo here for long spells of the summer felt like something I’d thought was long out of reach. A never-again sort of wonder. Maybe the one thing I’d wish for if given any wish in the world.

For one summer I held it. And it too now dwells in my heart—a grain I won’t let go. A big fat grain of joy that was. Now down where the other grains slumber, in the accumulated residue that amounts to our one storied little life. Where we take a crack at being wholly alive. And sometimes—yes, sometimes—it hurts.

How do you find your way through the hard parts of your life, when turning the page makes you feel hollowed?

Another legend breathed her last this week when Annie Dillard, long my patron saint of paying attention, of whirling sentences into spun wonders, breathed her last. My copies of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, her Pulitzer Prize-winning paean to paying attention, is so ink-spilled, it’s hard to pick just one passage to leave here. But here’s one for the ages:

“Thomas Merton wrote, “there is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues.” There is always an enormous temptation in all of life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end. It is so self-conscious, so apparently moral, simply to step aside from the gaps where the creeks and winds pour down, saying, I never merited this grace, quite rightly, and then to sulk along the rest of your days on the edge of rage.

I won’t have it. The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus.

Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock-more than a maple- a universe. This is how you spend this afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.”

Oh, Annie, we shall spend the afternoon. We shall, we shall, we shall.

How shall you spend it?