About once a month, I eat my lunch in the cemetery.

It’s not planned. I don’t have it written on a planner (okay yeah, I don’t even have a planner…): “Lunch at Cemetery, August 24th @ 11.45am.”

But there are days when I can’t think of what to eat. Days I can’t fill an hour. And I find myself driving through some fast-food abomination of a restaurant, and my car, as if on auto-pilot, ends up in front of my mother’s tombstone.

I don’t get out of the car. I just sit there, parked next to the little, rolling, shadowy hill, looking up at the tombstone, the little crooked angel statue leaning, almost sympathetically, against it. I sit there and eat and think and cry and wonder when it will stop hurting and simultaneously hope the answer is never.