Many, very many, years ago, walking down a street in Park Slope, Brooklyn, I watched the moon as it neared the horizon. It was early evening, the time when the stars are starting to flicker and the moon is bright, but the sky is still a luminous, deep blue. Suddenly I felt myself as a passenger on our planet - somewhat precariously standing, and walking, on this curved ground moving freely through space. For just a moment I felt almost as though I might slip off and float out away from my place - a sense of reverse vertigo - a danger of falling, not down, but up and off, drifting untethered in emptiness.
Tonight thoughts of my mother have a similar quality - except that it is she, not I, who is moving away, and through time as much as space - time and the transformation of death, and progress into another life.
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