Goodbye, Gram.

Just before we sent you back into the world, there was a lot of standing around.  Broken conversatins re-strung themselves around me, and I didn't bother to introduce myself.  Instead I watched.

Your family portrait reminded me of my own, and I said so, but only to the children.  They told me, I bet your father is here walking right next to you.  I swept my arm through the air.

Sensing the strangeness, the tension like some high-pitched cello string, the children splintered off into another world; perhaps this is where you would have wanted to be.  I followed them, for you or with you, to be your eyes, or my father's, or my own.  

Finally, the moment arrived, though it had already been broken open somewhere by the swingset.

We watched you drift away, only it wasn't you.

This leftover dust lingered, as you both had, not clinging but rather fading; thickening and then dissipating like a breath of steam on a cold morning.

We left that world behind, a few tears dropped into the creek, and in some other atemporal realm we shared a meal, with strangers who were somehow family, in a restaurant you went to (the only one you ever went to) when you were younger, and before I was even a thought.  

I saw why you fled that universe, the stale nature of its wide highways and flat sky.  And I wondered if you were happy to be brought back there, in the end, if only to vanish.