We buried my mother on a Wednesday.
It was raining, but only over our house.
Not the cemetery.
Not the sky.
Just our roof.
A storm with no clouds.
---
My daughter Clara sat beside me, silent and pale, drawing in her sketchpad while the priest muttered hollow words over a closed casket. Her pencil scratched softly, page after page, never looking up.
My husband, Theo, held Noah in his arms.
Our son kept whispering something.
Over and over again.
> "Nana said not to cry."
---
My mother, Eleanor Ashcroft, had been many things.
An art collector.
A woman of strict beliefs.
A mother I didn't really know.
And a grandmother my children feared and adored in equal measure.
She lived with us for the final months of her life, in the top room of the house.
Even as her body wasted away, she spoke like she knew what came after.
And she always said the same thing to the kids at night:
> "You came from the root.
The root never dies.
But one of you will."
---
I didn't want a eulogy.
But I was the daughter.
So I stood.
The church smelled like old wood and medicine.
Her portrait loomed above the altar—painted in oils when she was younger. Her eyes followed me wherever I moved, even now. Especially now.
I cleared my throat.
---
> "Eleanor Ashcroft was… complicated.
She loved deeply.
Controlled fiercely.
She had… expectations for us all.
I didn't always understand her.
I think she was preparing for something none of us saw coming."
I paused. Looked at Clara.
She was drawing something that looked like a tree.
But upside down.
Its roots curled like hands.
---
> "I think she believed in things she couldn't explain.
And now that she's gone…"
I felt it then.
The back of my throat tightening.
The heat in the air rising.
The air itself, sick.
Like the church was filled with invisible smoke.
---
"…I think she left part of herself behind."
---
I didn't mean it metaphorically.
I meant it literally.
And I think everyone in the pews knew it.
Because when the last word left my mouth, the candles near the casket snuffed out on their own.
No breeze.
Just silence.
And the smell of burning hair.
---
🕯️ That night
I sat alone in her room.
The hospice bed was still there, untouched.
Noah hadn't spoken since the funeral.
Theo was out on a walk.
Clara locked herself in her studio space upstairs and drew with the lights off.
I opened the drawer beside Mom's bed.
There were letters addressed to no one.
Bundles of hair tied with waxy red thread.
And a single note in her handwriting:
> "The blood of inheritance must run backward before it can run clean."
---
A sound behind me.
Not footsteps.
Just a breath.
I turned.
Nothing.
---
I should have left the room.
I should have burned the letters.
But I unfolded the last one.
And in the center of the page, scrawled in shaking hand, it said:
> "Only the child who kills will carry the root forward."
---
I dropped it.
My hands trembled.
And then—
From the hallway:
> "Mom?"
Clara's voice.
But small. Shaky.
I opened the door.
She stood at the top of the stairs, still holding her sketchpad.
> "Noah's standing outside."
I blinked. "Outside where?"
> "In front of the house."
> "In the rain."
> "Talking to her."
---
I ran.
I flung the front door open, my heart kicking against my ribs.
And there he was.
Noah.
Standing barefoot in the grass.
The rain—still falling only over our house—plastered his hair to his face.
He smiled when he saw me.
> "She's not gone."
> "She says she just moved into the root."
And then he pointed.
To the tree behind the house.
The one we don't plant near.
The one my mother used to sit under for hours without speaking.
The one with the rotting hole at its base.
---
I stepped toward it.
And I swear—I heard breathing from beneath the soil.