by Marshall Parks

Created on: June 24, 2008

"so early."

Those were the only two words I caught. I was in my own little world. I suppose I was grateful in a way for being pulled away from my thoughts. I looked up to see who was speaking. Of course it was Walter. I was standing outside the church sneaking a cigarette and watching the traffic. How could the world still be going on around me?

"What?" I asked him. He was the elder of our church and a distant relative. Most everyone in the church was related. Mother's family settled here three generations earlier. We were exiles. Chased from a country for choosing to be Protestant and rejecting Catholicism. His white hair and dark skin betrayed his Portuguese decent. At this moment, I hated him.

"I said it must be hard losing your mother so early." He spoke consolingly. I can read people well and Walt was attempting to elicit an emotional response, which I would never give him.

"Yeah, well it was harder to watch her die." I answered dryly and truthfully. I kept eye contact, took a deep drag from my cigarette and flipped the butt into the street. Discarding it as coldly as I discarded his attempt at making me cry. I turned my back to him and walked away, before my eyes betrayed my true feelings.

The cancer that took my mother also took my father's business. It was a lucrative business, but the expense of my mother's medical bills left him bankrupt. My mother had went before the elders, asking to live in the church's vacant manse next door. Our current minister lived in his own house and no one used the manse. They turned her away. The manse would be sold and the proceeds would be used for the church, itself. Two of the elders were her brother and sister. It would be twenty years before I set foot in that church again. The relationship with my aunt and uncle, already strained, was now severed.

I made it around the corner of the church before the tears came. My wife was having a cigarette in the back of the building. She rushed to me and we held each other and cried. I never explained to her the true reason for the depth of my grief. That would have to be my own cross to bear. It wasn't so much that I lost my mother. Watching her die was much worse. She was out of her pain now and in a way, I was relieved. It was more about the guilt I felt for the lousy son I was to her. I was her first child and she did her best. She had the greatest expectations for me as a child, but they were quickly erased with my behavior. I cried because I was sure that she hated me when she

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