I nibble on my lower lip and wonder if my mother might not want to answer my call. Would she still be angry with me, like she was the night before she died? Would she be proud of what I’m doing? Would she want me to stop? Would I stop if she asked me to?

“Okay,” I say quietly.

Mariah gestures for me to face her until our crossed legs touch, knee to knee. She takes my hands in hers and closes her eyes. Patricia nods reassuringly, and I close mine, too.

“We’ll start slow, Bree,” Patricia says. “You’ll just focus on your love for your mother.”

I pull an image of my mother up from memory and, right away, there’s pain. I see her in her favorite summer housedress, drifting through our home to open up the windows. She’s humming a melody-less tune. I’m reading a book on our living room couch, and when she reaches over my head to open the window, she looks down with a broad, toothy smile against copper-brown skin. Behind her glasses, love, pride, and affection live in the corners of her eyes. I smile, sending my love back, but it twists and sharpens into something else.

“Steady,” Patricia whispers. “Focus on your love for her. Now, imagine the love stretching back to your grandparents, then back further, like a strong thread connecting the generations. That’s what Mariah will follow.”

Like a Line.

I do my best to follow her instructions, imagine my grandmother as my mother described her, but as soon as I do, grief slices through me.

Patricia must sense my pain, like she always does. “Bree, it’s all right. Take slow breaths. We’re right here; you’re not alone.”

I don’t listen. All I can think of is loss. My loss of my mother, my mother’s loss of hers. And what I didn’t tell Patricia: that my great-grandmother died before my mom was born too. None of us met our grandmothers.

Mariah makes a low, whining sound. “There are wells of life, deep ones, but they’re all separated. Tied off from one another.”

Because death breaks our connection! I want to scream. Death is not a thread. It is the sharp cut that severs us. Death separates us from one another, and yet it holds us close. As deeply as we hate it, it loves us more.

My heart pounds to its rhythm.

One mother, two mothers, three mothers. Gone.

Gone.

Gone.

Gone.

Mariah gasps and releases my hands. My eyes open to find her eyes wide, her chest rising with rapid breaths. “Something terrible happened in your family… didn’t it?”