today, in the cabinet with all the pots and pans: an old tied publix bag
filled with my grandmother's prescription medications.

i felt sick, and decided not to make the cupcakes.

it hits me in waves like that, knocks me down.

my parents put her life to rest, cleaned up the house, when i was in india, and so i still find fragments all over the house. sometimes i smell her in the linen closet, and i think, she used that towel last. and the undeniable truth of the past hits me--of the way her life is suddenly obsolete, the way it only exists in the past, in the smell on the towels, or in the bags buried at the bottom of the cabinet.

sometimes i wonder--with it being so built into our lives, why we are so unprepared for death. it seems more like anomaly than destiny, something we can't find a place for, something we try to bury under the pots. but it still forces itself upon us, lurches into our consciousness, when we're trying to make cupcakes.

and not knowing what else to do, we close the cabinet doors.