And so many things get lost. Not just a set of keys or a photograph of your father with his first truck, but the door those keys once opened, the childhood house you long ago...

Who but my mother held those small pieces of my childhood? Where would they go when she was gone?

Mom, mom, mom, mom! A yowl rose from my gut, my bowels, my womb, raw as a birth cry but with no hope in it, a maddening howl, a roar, the water a wailing wall...