One sentence in the New York Times morning briefing reminds me why my son went away to college and now lives in Chicago.

“In memoriam:  Gloria Naylor, 66, won a National Book Award in 1983 for her debut novel, “The Women of Brewster Place”.

The Women of Brewster Place sat by my bedside  with a stack of reading after I got run over by a car in 1982.  My mother had suggested that I read it.  The novel bludgeoned me from the start with an account of a single mother smothering her son with so much love that she stifled him.  He amounted to nothing and came to a tragic end.

Not my son, I told myself, nine years later, lying on a gurney looking at the monitor during my ultra sound.

I’ve been accused of being unnaturally close to Patrick.  Regardless, I made him go to Mexico as an exchange student at age fifteen despite his protests. We argued all the way to the airport at 5:00 a.m.  When he returned six weeks later, taller, tan, grinning, he told me that making him go had been the best thing I’d ever done.  As high school waned, I encouraged him to only apply for out-of-state colleges.  I drove him to visit DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana.  Now he has a Bachelors from DU and an MFA from Northwestern, and lives in Evanston, Illinois, eight hours from Mother and the safety of his childhood bedroom and his old dog.

I hear the dying Google Fiber box thudding inside the cabinet and my bleating unchecked alarm repeatedly urging me to get out of bed.  I think that stupid dog has peed by the front door again.  Warmed over coffee and an orange serves as my breakfast.  A pile of papers on the dining room table will have to be assembled and put away before I forget where they go or what I need to do with them.   No voice but mine breaks the stillness of this house.  But I am not complaining.

Gloria Naylor wrote two novels and has died, at 66, of heart failure.  Fare the well, Ms. Naylor.  Thank you for showing me the way to raise my son, if not by example, then by horrible warning of what can happen if the bird never flies from the nest. May your heart forever after rest easy.

It’s the fifth day of the thirty-fourth month of My Year Without Complaining.  The wondrous circle of life continues.