A Thursday in May
It was a Thursday morning. I was in the kitchen, doing what I usually did at that time of the day, trying to call my mom. Every Thursday, I called her, just to hear her voice, to make sure she was okay. That morning, the home where she lived, call it a nursing home would be stretching it, didn’t answer. I waited a bit and called again. Still nothing.
A little uneasy, I dialed my brother to ask if he had heard from her. He didn’t answer either. I started to feel something, a vague, creeping discomfort. But I brushed it off.
Then suddenly, out of nowhere, the clock hanging on the kitchen wall crashed onto the floor. The glass shattered across the tiles, and the clock hands flew in different directions. The sound was so sharp, so final, it stunned me.
I stood there for a moment, trying to make sense of it. A gust of early spring wind, I told myself. Just a coincidence.
I opened the cupboard, pulled out the broom and dustpan, and began sweeping the glass. But as I moved around the broken pieces, a strange and unsettling thought pushed its way to the front of my mind.
“My mom?” I said aloud, looking toward my wife, who sat on the couch in the living room. Her eyes were wide, watching me with a quiet kind of alarm.
Not ten seconds later, my phone rang.
It was my daughter. She was crying. Through the sobs, she told me her cousin, from El Salvador, had just called her to tell her, my mom had died.
I tried to console her, knowing how close she and her grandmother had been, how much love and laughter they’d shared. After I hung up, I called my brother again. This time, he picked up. He confirmed the news.
It was Thursday, May 26, 2022, around ten in the morning. My mother was ninety-four. I had visited her just a few months earlier, in February. I knew then it would be the last time. I knew I wouldn’t be attending her funeral. The relationship among us, her children, was fractured by then. We couldn’t agree on how to care for her in her final days. So, sadly her children were permanently we broke apart.
In the months and years that followed, my daughter and I talked about my mom many times. But it wasn’t until this summer, during a trip together to visit my son and granddaughters in Darmont, Nova Scotia, that she shared something she had never told me before.
She said she remembered something vividly from that Thursday morning in 2022. Something she couldn’t explain.
“I don’t think it was a dream,” she said. “It felt real. It was real.”
This is what she told me:
That morning, as my mom lay in the hospital bed, weakened by the complications that would eventually kill her, someone visited her. Someone she hadn't seen in decades, my dad.
He appeared by her side, gently lifting her up. With the softest smile, he reached out his hand and invited her to dance.
“No,” he responded, “this is real. I came to take you with me. We will never be apart again.” And in that moment, they both began to change. The years melted away. Their wrinkles vanished. They became young again and began to dance.
They danced to their favorite song: a tango called Orchids in the Moonlight.
They danced with grace, as if they had never been apart.
My daughter doesn’t know how to explain what she saw. And maybe she doesn’t need to. Whether it was a vision, a message, a spiritual passing, or something beyond our understanding it doesn’t really matter. What matters is what it meant.
To her, to me, to them reunited, forever dancing, under the moonlight.
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