November is the longest month.

Its standard thirty days stretch into an eternity as it marches towards the date of my Mother’s passing.

I feel the weight and foreboding grow strong and heavy, tuck me in like a suffocating blanket; fog my thinking, cloud my judgment, until that day finally cuts through the haze, all sharp edges and clarity.

Today.

My Mother gets two days.
She passed on Thanksgiving (which was the 23rd three years ago.)

The last two years I have not turned over the calendar because I knew I would be undone by the magnitude of those two days.

I have gone from October to December, nerves raw, unable to view the squares counting down the days.

This year I turned the page.

I acknowledged November but from a distance.

I passed the calendar side of the refrigerator quickly, eyes lowered, trying not to look directly at it.

I kept myself occupied with “busy” work but the heart remembers.

There is a soundtrack to grief; as anyone who has lost will tell you.

Sounds and songs that are perhaps mundane but connect and bind and become fused with that time and place; songs that can bring you back and to your knees with just a note or two.

Because my words will fail me this week, I am going to share that soundtrack with you over the next few days.

This one speaks of a “Long December” but as I listened to it on repeat in hospital parking lots in the dead of night, I changed the month to November and clung to the phrase “Maybe this year will be better than the last.”

And perhaps one year it will be.