A beautiful woman (Patreon)

My mother is a beautiful woman.  When I was eighteen, I didn't think so and I moved out of the house because she treated me like a kid! How dare she! I was a grown woman (of eighteen... cue embarrassment here because I wasn't even a little grown).  

Four months later, she came to me and said she wanted to leave my father, but she was afraid to.  He had moved to Las Cruces and wanted her to follow.  She thought it would be easier to disappear into one of the cities in the southwest where we didn't have family members he could target, so she asked me to move with her.  I did.  

I worked on getting my Associates and finding a university he wouldn't know about. She hid money and hid money and hid money. When I was ready to start at the university, we made our move together. We dropped off the face of the planet, as far as he was concerned, and had our mail forwarded to a drop box we only checked once or twice a month.

It meant he could only send nasty letters--and boy did he.

But for the last 30 years we've been best friends, roommates, family, mutual cheerleaders.  I saw her through cancer. She's been clucking over me with valley fever.  When I published my first short story with Dreamspinner, I tried to hide the complimentary books because mom was old school, and I didn't know how she'd handle gay romance.

She saw them and supported me unconditionally. She never read them, but she read every one of your reviews.

This morning I woke up and found her dead.  She'd had a flu shot, but apparently a head cold or a flu variant not in the shot managed to--with her COPD--take her away from me far too soon.  With the exception of those few months when I was eighteen, she was the center of my life for my entire life.

And now she's gone.

I can't begin to describe the pain.  I may lose myself in stories.... I may shut the Patreon down for a few months. I don't know. Right now my heart hurts so much that all I can feel is numb.  So I will make a decision later.

Right now I have to mourn the loss of a truly great woman.