I'm telling you this for a reason. It was my grandmother who prompted the story. My grandmother believed she would survive, had faith in surgeons and in God. But words become useless when this conversation or that conversation may be the last one -- who knew? And if it were the last time I spoke with her, did her passing become another gate that I must pass, fences behind, a stubbled field ahead?

My grandmother arrived at the hospital on a Friday. What was the feeling of rest on a gurney wheeling down the corridor? The lights streamed by like planets overhead. The operating room cold, the doctors offering briefest greetings, adjusting lights, painting the site, the anesthetic whisper, then the blankness into artificial sleep.

I waited to hear about her operation, planning what to say. Outside my window children shouted, a father threw a ball. From the angle of the window sash I saw only empty buildings when the telephone rang.

I learned I had lost the only sense of place I still owned. No day prepares for what the night gives, throwing me past the gate. The ivy hissed, stirred by the wind, I couldn't risk hearing laughter from next door.

What is remembered in the space of stepping when the threshold breaks? A fleck of my life perceived at the edges, but when I resurrect another point that too ends.

I had moved a generation closer, beginning to count stones. From the mother comes the mother. From me, a barren girl, no progeny, then and now merging into nothing. I tried on that silence, what changes, the small works inside.