when someone great is gone

my aunt gail has been through everything.. her mother (my grandma) barely survived her birth. she was overly-large, disgruntled, and highly dystempered when entering the world in 1934. the first of three girls, she was delivered with hell's fury on her chin, a veritable rabble-rouser from the start, and to the finish.

i saw her the other day, with tubes shoved despondantly up her nose and her wits fading like the crimson lace of sunset vanishing over the horizon. it pained me in those last hours to even meet her clarvoyant gaze, let alone bask in it's forever place in my understanding of yesterday's rebellion and heart-felt paradigm.

and in her last gasps, i felt her fullest fight: a fight against all that stands in the way of true and flightless conviction, a stance of noble distinction. she stood true to her decisions, and faith in these things were what gave her purpose, in a world that grew weary around her.

and now that it's all gone, to what do i owe her rememberance's observance? a cup full of ashes? a vision of her glances? a time too enchanted to tell her of her strength? for none of these things can add up to the sum of her influence--the wars of confluence, a beast of the nonchalence, a representation of everything buoyant and well-suffered--a woman not a mother. a keeper of soul's essence, and observance too.