You know that feeling when the air just… stops? It was 2:17 AM. I was in the recliner, the one with the worn velvet that smelled faintly of old coffee and lavender air freshener, and the hospice nurse had just closed the bedroom door. Not gently, not with a quiet click, but with a firm thud that echoed in the silence of our ridiculously small, impossibly quiet farmhouse. Mom had been gone for maybe five minutes. Maybe ten. My brain kept replaying the last breath, the one that wasn’t followed by another. The sound of her old wind chimes outside had stopped too, the wind dying down just as everything else did. I just sat there. For what felt like an hour but was probably closer to twenty minutes because I looked at the clock again after the nurse coughed in the kitchen. She was making tea. Of course she was. You watch someone die slowly for months, for years, and then it’s over, and the first thing you do is make tea. I wanted to scream at her. Or maybe at the ceiling. Or maybe just at the universe for being so… predictable. For being so cruel in its predictability. I was so angry. I *am* so angry. Angry at Mom for leaving me with this—this empty house, this quiet, this… rural everything. Angry at myself for not feeling more. Not feeling what I *should* feel. The past year has been a blur of doctors’ appointments in towns an hour away (because our local clinic is a joke), of administering meds at precise times (7 AM, 1 PM, 7 PM, 1 AM), of holding her hand and pretending I didn't see the fear in her eyes, even though it mirrored my own. I gave up my job at the library, the one decent job in this whole damn county, because who else was going to do it? My sibling is always "busy." Always. But here’s the thing, the part that makes me feel like a monster: After the nurse closed that door, after the silence settled, something else settled in too. A quiet. Not just an absence of sound, but an absence of *tension*. The constant hum of worry, the knot in my stomach that had become a permanent fixture—it just… loosened. And for a single, fleeting moment, before the anger came roaring back, before the grief probably arrives (I’m still waiting for it, honestly), there was a tiny, almost imperceptible sense of peace. A lightness. And I hate myself for it. I hate myself for that quiet moment of relief. Because what kind of child feels that after saying goodbye to their parent, their *only* parent? The kind that's exhausted, I guess. The kind that’s just so incredibly, deeply tired. I’m going to have to call Aunt Carol in the morning. She’ll have thoughts. So many thoughts. And I still haven’t even changed out of yesterday’s clothes.