Supposed Angel - Intro

My father, no angel, will not simply vanish. We will watch him grow old and it will be his final gift to us, his two sons: teaching us how to age gracefully, how to die. My mother’s gift was different. It was singular, tragic and difficult to talk about even now, some fifteen years later. Her gift was that of eternal beauty. My mother was a metaphor. She sacrificed herself, I imagine, upon the alter of eternal beauty so that we might always recall, without the aid of photographs or drugs or dreams, her as Beauty, and derive strength from this. Our vanished mother, the Supposed Angel of Idlewild.