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A Hole in My Heart

Bill Tope

I awoke with a start,
then became aware of
the clamor from my
TV. Instantly I reduced
the volume.

Don’t want to disturb
Mom, I thought, and
I was mindful of the
late hour.

Then I gazed through
the open door, down
the hall at Mom’s room
and discovered that
her door was shut.

Then it all came back
to me. Mom had died,
more than four years
ago.

I glanced at my cat,
Baby, and she yawned.
The stillness of the
house was manifest.

I had never felt so
lonely. In the living
room, there hung on
a hook a shirt of my
mother’s.

I had laundered that
shirt the week before
my mother passed and
I guess by keeping it
ready, I was keeping
my mother alive, at
least in my own mind.

In the final months of
Mom’s life, to make it
easy to summon me
when needed, I had
given her a horn, the
type you’d find on a
bicycle or a clown car.

She pressed the bulb
of the horn repeatedly.
sometimes forty times
a night, but I never
chided her. More than
anything, I didn’t want
her to feel afraid or
lonely.

Loneliness: the bane of
civilized man. I feel it’s
keen knife’s edge every
time I remember the
hole in my heart left by
the passing of my mom.

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