Today makes it eight months since my mom died. She died on August 12th. I was sitting in the car in the parking lot of Centinela Feed on Pico, waiting with my son for my wife to get some cat food, when my phone rang. A nurse at Woodland Terrace named Ida Alvis — a woman with whom I’d spent the better part of the previous day and night arguing hopelessly about mom’s condition and medication — called to tell me that another nurse had found her “unresponsive” and paramedics were taking her to the hospital.
That was the beginning of the tsunami. I’ve felt more of less like I was drowning since that moment. She taught me how to swim, but I miss her so much.