There was only mom

One morning I got a call from my younger brother Jaime. He was crying. He tells me my mom’s health, which had been slowly declining over the past month from advanced cancer, had reached the point where not much time was left. I was shocked. I felt the inertia of my regular life: not wanting to let people at work down, the meditation retreat I had booked for next week. I cried in the shower. I cried on the way to work as I listened to these Zen chants. Everything just seemed to hit harder. The strikes of the singing bowls sounded definitive, saying “Hurry up! Hurry up! Time is running out! Everything that begins ends!” By chance I had a session booked with my therapist that very day and once again I cried. “How can someone love me like this [unconditionally]? I don’t understand”. My therapist had lost her own mother some years prior. “That’s a mother’s love”, she said. I booked a one way ticket to the Canary Islands where she lived, and three flights and 20 hours later I got there.…