Mom's favorite tree was a ginkgo. There was one growing right outside her window. It lost the last of its leaves in the nights before she left us. Like the tree she was ready to shed the old life in preparation for the new.

I talked to her a lot about balance in her last days. The give and take that the universe imposes on us that we can't control. The beauty and the cruelty of it. My mother gave all of herself to help others. It didn't leave enough for her and sometimes not enough for her children. But there was a balance in it. She knew what she was doing and she knew when it was time.

I will never know the version of my mother that all her friends experienced. It is very different from the life we went through together. But I am more than ok with that. She was loving and kind and supportive and all the ugly hard things get to fade away and those beautiful things get to shine. Just like she did. The balance is restored in her memory and all we take with us to this next life without her is the love. That will last forever and goes beyond space and time and this physical world that restrained her from shining as brightly as she deserved to.