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Welcome to my first story on my new (old) website! Let me know what you think in the comments. From now on I will go back to posting at least once a week. Of hope and morning sun, no matter what life throws at us …

– Chris

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DEBORAH, 28 Feb 2017:

The flight across the Atlantic was as uneventful as something could be when you were going home to bury your mother.

Deborah corrected herself. Hélène wasn’t gone yet, but the doctor had said she would probably not last another fortnight. Her kidneys were failing, and there was nothing more they could do.

Hélène Delacroix was born in 1928. Eighty-eight years was a good age, people said. They offered the usual condolences, the usual reassurances.

Deborah didn’t care. She responded politely, but the truth was, no age was a good age unless you were ready to go.

She had felt the shadows creeping closer herself, now in her sixties, and wondered how much time she had left. She was still in relatively good health, but for how long? And when she was gone, who would help her daughter?

Who would be there for her autistic grandson? What would her husband do without her—unless, of course, he worked himself into an early grave first, running that damn company of his.

“Would you like something to drink?” asked a flight attendant, a pleasant young man about the age of her son-in-law—thirty-something, maybe early forties. Was that young now? She could hardly believe it.

“No, thank you,” she said.

“Very well, madame.”

The captain’s voice crackled over the intercom, announcing they were now in French airspace, crossing over the Cotentin Peninsula on their approach to Paris. It wasn’t the most direct route, but something about the weather and wind patterns had dictated the change.

She hadn’t noticed any turbulence, but she trusted the captain knew what he was doing.

From Paris, she would rent a car and drive to Honfleur the small fishing village on the Channel where her mother had grown up.

The nursing home was there—one of the few available. Deborah had spoken with her cousin about moving Hélène to a larger, more modern facility in Le Havre, but her mother had refused.

Of course, she had. Her heart was already buried in that village, the place where she had watched her parents dragged away by the Gestapo during the Vel’ d’Hiv roundup for hiding Jews.

It was where her brother had taken care of her in the lighthouse alongside his Clara, and where she’d met that handsome young GI just after liberation – a place where unfathomable pain and joy had fused.

No wonder she wouldn’t leave again. Hélène Delacroix – later Sawyer – had been away for too long. Deborah understood that.

The young soldier was, of course, George Sawyer-her father. He later returned as a missionary and converted Hélène to the Mormon faith in the late 1940s. George and Hélène then married and left for the United States in 1951. The following year, Deborah was born.

So much time had passed—it was inconceivable. Was it always like this? Had her grandparents’ deaths felt the same? Even her father’s?

She couldn’t quite grasp what it meant to have lived a full life and suddenly be gone.

At Charles de Gaulle Airport, Deborah quickly found the rental service and her Peugeot 308. She had already booked the car, and without pausing to rest or shake off the jet lag, she was on the road soon after retrieving her luggage.

Normandy looked just as it had when she first visited. At this time of year, there was a persistent, fine mist that wasn’t quite rain but dampened everything.

When was “first”? That must have been… 1983? Yes, that winter. Carrie was old enough, she had reckoned, to travel so far from Skye.

So she and Calum, her first husband, had brought toddler Carrie to visit Carrie’s mamie as often as possible. It was after Deborah’s father had died, and Hélène had returned to France for good, leaving America behind.

Those were different times.

Deborah had been a young mother, caught between two worlds, as usual. Her years in New York City—smoking pot, wandering aimlessly, caught in the restless drift of youth—had ended when she married. Her attachment to the Church of Latter-Day Saints had ended years before.

Settling down in Scotland with the man she met on an impromptu holiday and fell in love with should have been a beautiful new beginning, but instead, it ended in divorce, and in her husband’s slow descent into alcoholism. 

She wondered if she should call her ex-husband?

Calum and Hélène had always understood each other in some strange way. Would it be awkward for her ex-husband to say goodbye to his mother-in-law while his ex-wife was there? Maybe. Maybe not.

Except for Hélène who was too frail, they had all been together again for the first time in years last Christmas in the States. It had gone fine. Well—fine enough.

She would reach Honfleur first. Then she’d call the nursing home. Call Sophie. Let her know she had arrived. And then, finally, she would rest.

She drove through the town center, passed Vieux Bassin – the old harbor and then reached her goal.

The lighthouse was still there. Sophie had kept it when she inherited it from her parents, Deborah’s aunt and uncle. Her cousin rately used it, though. Instead, she had turned it into a bed-and-breakfast, hiring someone to handle the upkeep.

Unlike the grand lighthouses of Brittany, this was a squat, practical structure—a cylindrical stone tower rising from a square two-story cottage. Its white paint peeled in the salt air, and moss clung to its northern side. Only the lantern room at the top, with its copper dome and precise Fresnel lens, offered any elegance in this otherwise utilitarian building that had been the Delacroix family home for three generations.

Madame Dubois, who singlehandedly ran the establishment for romantic tourists, was in Alsace with her family this time of year. Not enough guests to warrant a paycheck, Deborah imagined. She wondered how often Sophie visited or how much income it actually generated.

It was a curious contradiction—Sophie, this academic powerhouse whose formidable mind dominated Parisian intellectual circles with post-structuralist theories about the revolutionary failure of May 1968, still clinging to a lighthouse on the Normandy coast. Perhaps academia didn’t pay as well as it should. It certainly didn’t in the United States.

Should she call Calum?

That was the question. But when she saw the sea, she felt like it was probably a good—and then near-miss with a truck on the highway was a stark reminder of why she was here.

And she wasn’t here to die before her mother—not in some stupid accident.

Her father had nearly met the same fate back in the 1960s when the mission president had been injured in a crash that killed his wife.

He had asked Deborah’s father to accompany him that day, to mediate a dispute in a small community in southern France.

Her father had declined—too distracted by his family, by Deborah. If he had accepted, he might have been the one in that car. He might have been the one who died.

She had to will herself to stop all those thoughts of death. She got out of the car and feeling the fresh Channel breeze on her face cleared her mind somewhat.

Sophie had left the keys in their usual place. Deborah let herself in. The house smelled the same—salt and old wood, a hint of something floral, long since faded.

It had been years since she had last stayed here for more than a few days. Now she would be here for perhaps many weeks. It would be hard holding back all he memories about … disasters. And heartbreak.

The long nights spent staring out at the sea, searching for answers in the endless horizon.

Outside, the fishing boats were coming in. Tourists strolled along the docks, their lives untouched by the weight pressing down on her chest. Something clutched at her heart. She wanted to cry. But instead, she found the key, stepped inside, and shut the door.

There was so much to do when someone died. And yet, in the midst of it all, you had to make sense of your own grief.

You had to carry on. It wasn’t fair, but that was life. That was how it had always been.

She sat down on the edge of the bed, letting exhaustion settle over her. And then, without thinking, she started to hum.

A tune from childhood, soft and familiar. Her mother had sung it to her when she was little. Later, she sang it to Carrie.

It was a silly thing, really—how a simple song could bring comfort.

But maybe, at the end of life, things weren’t so different from the beginning. Maybe, when all else was stripped away, all anyone really needed was for someone to hum a tune, to remind them they weren’t alone.

She picked up her phone. No more grudges. No more wasted years.

She thought briefly of calling her cousin first.

But she dialed her ex-husband’s number instead.

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Cerises d’amour aux robes pareilles
Tombant sous la feuille en gouttes de sang
Mais il est bien court le temps des cerises
Pendants de corail qu’on cueille en rêvant

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Would you like to share your story – it might inspire one of mine? Read more – I’d love to hear from you!

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Cover photo by Jack Cohen on Unsplash

Honfleur – Photo by Mark Lawson on Unsplash

Normandy coast – Photo by Nusa Urbancek on Unsplash

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Soundtrack: “Les Temps des Cerises” – here performed by Yves Montand (1974)

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Read the first chapter in a novel I am working on about Deborah’s youth in Paris, 1967-8!

Take These Dogs Away From Me

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Also, check out my new ongoing story taking place in 2025 about Dave Reese considering whether or not to kill himself – or his MAGA neighbor.

Most recent update: 1 March 2025.

A House Divided

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