Grief is weird.<\/p>\n
Today was the Lancaster Stormers’ Fan Fest. They were to play an exhibition game against the Black Sox (a traveling semi-pro team, AIUI) before the Atlantic League season begins on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
When I entered the stadium, I saw tables set up around the concourse. A local elementary school was holding an arts and crafts fair.<\/p>\n
Grief came along and hammered me.<\/p>\n
Last year’s Fan Fest had the same set-up. On the third base side there was a little boy named Gabriel selling handmade greeting cards. I stopped to look. He had two pricing tiers, he explained, and he said he had more. I bought the one that caught my eye initially. His mom had to prompt him to give me an envelope; he handed the me one he’d been holding, and it was bent and crumpled. I thought about asking for a crisp one, but decided against it. The crumple was part of the charm.<\/p>\n
This was the last Mother’s Day card I sent my mom.<\/p>\n
In January I got it back. My sisters had pulled together a box of my mom’s things for me, and the card was among the things. Upon seeing it, I began sobbing.<\/p>\n
Seeing the kids and their tables brought all this back to me. I held it together until I reached the restroom. Mostly. In the restroom I started to cry. I felt unsettled for a while.<\/p>\n
There were kids selling cards, but none of them were a little Hispanic boy named Gabriel.<\/p>\n
Sometimes it feels like she isn’t gone. Sometimes it feels like she wasn’t real. And sometimes it feels like a bottomless chasm.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Grief is weird. Today was the Lancaster Stormers’ Fan Fest. They were to play an exhibition game against the Black Sox (a traveling semi-pro team, AIUI) before the Atlantic League season begins on Tuesday. When I entered the stadium, I saw tables set up around the concourse. A local elementary school was holding an artsContinue reading “The Last Card”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35353,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[4816,5353],"class_list":["post-35343","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-life","tag-lancaster-barnstormers","tag-leona-gibson","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35343","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35343"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35343\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/35353"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}