My Mother Is An X-File

I have written before about my Mother's passing.  (You can see that here.)  Today my amazing wife Daisy, and I, were plowing through boxes of stuff at Mom's house, getting it ready for the movers to show up bright and early tomorrow to clear it out in preparation for selling it.  Box after box surrendered to our clawing hands and keen eyes.  We separated the wheat from the chaff, memories from melancholy, keeping what was worthy and laying the rest aside for sale, contribution, or the dump.  I managed to recover a presumed lost family heirloom for my brother and almost literally a ton of photographs, including a great one of my maternal grandmother's clan from 1910.

The work of letting go went by easily as we lent each other our often silent support.  I was smiling through most of it, and determined through the rest.

Then I found IT!  (Cue spooky TV show music.)   A photo album from my Mother's trip to Machu-Picchu.  My Mother went there some 20, or so, years ago on a small inheritance form an aunt who had died.  She always was fascinated by the Incans, and she simply fell in love with the place.  When she returned she was a changed woman.  Never quite the same.  She often regailed my borther, and I, with stories from her trips and interesting facts and secrets of the Incans.  She always longed to go back.  For years she promised to get healthy and strong again to go back to that place, and to take us with her this time.

When my Mom passed away, my brother suggested that he and I should make good on Mom's promise.  It has become our plan to take her cremains to Machu-Picchu and scatter them in that place she loved so much.  So, it was with a deep love and joy that I looked through the photo album of her trip there decades ago.  The last page was a yellowed old copy of the itenerary that the tour agency had sent to her.

My Mother died on April 14th of this year.  On April 14th of that year she arrived in Cuzco, to rest for a day to acclimate to the altitude.  Two days later she took a train to Machu-Picchu, which will become her final resting place.

If Scully, and Mulder, knock on the door in the next five minutes, I am going to freak right out.

I love you Mom, you're one spooky chic!