One of Those Wristbands

I found my mom dead unexpectedly early last month. She was 44, and we're not sure why she died, but she had some health problems that could have potentially led to heart failure. That's what we think happened.

Still, it was really out of nowhere. I was the one to find her (Dad and my little brother were at Bonnaroo), but that's not the unsettling part.

I found her in the morning dead in her bed (for hours) after I had woken up and showered. However, before I showered, as I walked out of my room down the hall to the bathroom, I thought it was weird that I couldn't hear anything from my mom's room.

This is not something I would have questioned normally (assumed she was gone, that I just couldn't hear her, etc.). But it flashed through my head, "What if she was dead?", and I reasonably ignored the idea as ludicrous and random and took my shower.

25 minutes later, I walked into her room to say goodbye before I went to work.

In the surreal whirlwind of overwhelming emotion and activity that ensued, I didn't think about my glimmer of premonition for days or even weeks. Even now, months later, I think it was probably just a hosed-up coincidence. But drat.

Oh yeah, she died on a Friday morning, early but we're not sure when. A week after she died, my dad was woken up by somebody poking him insistently at around 7am (he was sleeping in the bed she died in), but when he looked around nobody was there and my brother and I were both asleep in our rooms.

A week or two after she died we also randomly found one of those wristbands (you know, for cancer or for poverty or whatever) that was black and for personal loss, hanging on a towel rack in her bathroom, that none of us had ever seen before.

These things are mildly comforting, mildly eerie, and probably not noteworthy.

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