She had always been a tiny little thing. When she was cutting my then waist length natural curls I remember she'd lower the chair and stand on her tiptoes, and would still need to stretch her slender arms and delicate fingers to reach the ends of my blonde strands. I always took in her face every time I had an appointment with her. She had the most beautiful bone structure I've ever seen. Like a muse stepping through the screen of a smoky Art Deco film. Strong but sensual, tough yet fragile.
She'd been having back pain for a while, months actually now that I think back on it, but dismissed it to being on her feet all day, and it seemed a logical rationale when you watched her flit around the salon she now called her own. Not a lot of time had passed since she and her husband had finally celebrated the birth of their first child, a daughter. A process which had been very difficult for them emotionally and risky for Lorna physically, due in part to her petite figure. So when she was diagnosed with cancer and given less than a year to live the news hit us all like a full throttle train wreck. The most haggard and weary of all those passengers being of course, her husband. A fireman and most devoted husband, I think it was beyond his ability to fathom that he would be unable to rescue her, that he would be losing the love of his life so soon after becoming a father, after finally becoming a family.
I went to visit her in the months that followed, making the surreal journey to their home to sit on the edge of the sofa where she lay, quietly chatting with her or bringing her a little juice until she was too weary for company and her voice became a whisper. I was only a teenager at the time, and although I knew on a fundamental level what I was witnessing I had no context for it, no point of reference, no real way to make sense of the painful transition I was bearing witness to.
I remember distinctly our final afternoon together. Their living room was a few steps down from the kitchen, with a set of sliding doors that faced south, extending your view over a modest pasture and an un obstructed vista beyond. The light was warm and golden. It was that band of hours during the summer when the sun hangs long and low in the sky and seems to take forever to set. I'd just placed a cup on the coffee table, our visit much shorter today than usual. I could sense it, and I could read it I her gaze, her tone, something ethereal and indescribable that was informing us that this was the last time we would talk like this, breathe the air together like this, be together like this. I realized on the bleary drive back home that I had recognized that which was leaving before it's departure. I have never forgotten the texture of that feeling. It brings me to tears even as I sit and write about it years later, even when so much time has passed and so much has changed.
She left the world we know in the small quiet hours that night, those collection of minutes where time blurs and floats steadily from darkness to dawn. I like to think of her ascending in that way, not skyward in our conventional notion of the heavens, but drifting upwards in a golden, gauzy warmth, dissolving delicately back into the beautiful world she'd come from, back to the sweet and secure place she'd left briefly so she could share a little of her time, with us.