Dear C,

You call me all the time, as if I am a small bowl of water and you a bird. The problem is that the bowl of water is always empty.

Thank you, C, for caring for my father. Thank you for calling me every week. Yesterday you called, and I realized you hadn’t been contacting me to give me reports, but to talk. I see now you call me to tell me about your suffering.

A few days before my mother died, she said: I’m done. I don’t care about him anymore. I’m too tired.

She pressed the button and crossed the street when the blinking man was still red. In the intersection, six crows descended. She chose to die so she wouldn’t have to care for Father anymore.

The last time we took Father out to eat was the last time he would ever go out to eat. When we paused in front of a golf course, I looked in the rearview mirror to see if he had noticed it. His head turned slightly to the right. When we stopped, he looked at the white carts moving, the small people pushing dimpled balls around with their sticks.

I wondered if Father had remembered his obsession with golf. How he had taped photos of golf swings all over his walls, how he had played almost every day for ten years, until his stroke.

As we passed the golf course, nothing in his expression changed. And I knew then that his brain had become skeined, like the fake spiderwebs we spread out on the bushes each Halloween. How we gather them, stretch them, attach them to a corner and pull and pull.

I’m sorry, C. I put Father on Seroquel today. My mother would have never done that. But my mother died. My mother would have never put him in memory care. But my mother died.

Some days, I want to tell everyone I meet that my mother died. Sometimes I do tell them, just to see who reacts. Most people don’t. Most people probably wonder why I am still writing about my mother. I want to tell them that it is because my mother is still dead.

I don’t blame anyone for not reacting, for some people still live in a bright room. A bright hour, as Emerson says. We often say night falls. I think the night rises. I think the bright falls.