Storm Mourning

You recognize the pale gray pink before a storm; you know the storm's coming. Even so, when the storm came in this morning, I was unprepared for its volume—thunder like a jet just off the tarmac, hail the size of rock salt, rain in straight white nails driving down.

It is a storm in the wake of a week of losses. The grandson of my mother's best friend, just 24. An ebullient former colleague of my husband's, only 49. A friend's beloved father. The first two taken as suddenly as the storm that just knocked in. They were there, and then they were vanished. They were whole, and then they were gone. The third a man who, his daughter writes, "was my hero and my best friend."

We are silenced by storm. We are made to listen.