November 5th, 2025 - Lydie Blevins

My house was empty, 

even with an old dog, two 

cats and memories. 

For two years, the purpose of my life was to enable my bedridden mother to take one more breath. Before those last breaths, the house bustled with home health care, medical aids, and medical transports. Then life seeped out of my home as my mother took her last breath and my father spoke his last words in my living room. And then everyone was gone. 

When the door closed to the past, the emptiness rippled from the walls in an unending cascade.  

While the remnants of my former life — my books, my furniture, my piano, my knickknacks — replaced the hospital beds and the oxygen tanks, my house remained a mausoleum.  

I rummaged through Dad’s papers for the tax man and picked up his well-worn Medicare card. I’m still a year away from obtaining my own ‘red, white and blue card’ and the mysteries of Medicare. These stacks of papers from my parents' lives will become the objects of my future. 

I sorted through records for the unresolved work of the estate, for the unpaid taxes for my parents and myself, and for family mineral rights to be resolved in another state. Their burials did not unravel the sixty-seven years of their married life. 

It turns out the commandment to honor your parents is eternal. Nothing prepared me for a life without them. Gone was my emergency contact, which I learned is more than a name in a space on a form. 

I amassed a debt of sleep and a debt of grief.  

These debts created havoc in my body. Chronic cough, chronic acid reflux, and chronic depression suffocated my life spirit inside the world of my own Medicare services. Anxiety and fear formed layers of pressure around my body like a gel. But the real thickening happened in my brain. 

With a brave face, I attended a few writing conferences, but the energy it took not to be an imposter was overwhelming. My own bills to restore my misplaced website reminded me of my misplaced life as a writer.  

And the darkness, quiet, and emptiness, pushed the good atoms out of my brain. 

The television ran twenty-four hours a day to cover the ever-present silence.  

Trapped in my chair, surrounded by the silent emptiness and darkness, I researched my ancestry on the web. I’m frozen in an unknown time, unable to move backward or forward in my life, as my fingers clicked through the past. The stories of my relatives intoxicated me. I learned from the centuries of their lives that it is in my DNA to suffer and still find the will to move forward.  

On the darkest of my darkest days, my brother brought two soldiers to my back door with the news of the death of my twenty-four-year-old nephew in Germany. As an aunt who never had children, I experienced the loss of a child and a future emergency contact. A door to the future closed. 

While depression solidified around my limbs, everyone in the outside world believed I was okay. Still, deep in the Jello there remained a faint creative pulse.  

Then COVID happened. The darkness, quiet and emptiness of my house invaded the world outside. This emboldened me; I understood a frozen world. I zoomed my way through every meeting I could find. Creativity flowed out of me in a video blog about the adventures of my COVID-19 Rabbit. I drafted the story of a bat who spread the virus and crafted the start of a COVID novel. 

When COVID ended, I returned to the world beyond my house. Step by step, I traveled to Oxford for a conference and then on to Cambridge and London. Fear and anxiety covered every step that I took on the cobblestones. Later that year, I went to another conference in Connecticut, which required driving through four of the five boroughs of New York City during rush hour.  

Amid the fall colors, I watched a leaf fall from a tree in a brilliant dance in the breeze. The leaf brought me a new appreciation for life, as it chose the moment to fall, to dance, to nourish the ground.  

Life is the dance of death I learned.  

As I move forward, my emergency contact is now my Apple Watch, which knows me better than anyone. It knows how much I sleep, the rate of my breathing, how steady my steps are and asks if I have fallen.  

I fulfilled a lifelong dream and enrolled in an MFA program, which I learned about at the conference in Connecticut. I graduated at the start of 2025, with a handful of short stories looking for their readers, and an almost finished novel. Small steps to my future.  

Even so, my house  

is empty with the new dog 

 and an older cat. 

---

Lyndie Blevins is vintage mid-century, a Texan and a Jesus-follower who enjoys the UT Longhorns, fabric art, writing and books. She yearns for wide open spaces and writes about Texas and characters who find their true fulfillment in community.

Lyndie wants you to learn more about Austin Bat Cave. Austin Bat Cave continues to support a creative community of poets, novelists, journalists, musicians, and educators through exciting programming with partner schools and nonprofits. They have expanded their one-on-one college essay support services during the COVID crisis for high school seniors in Title 1 schools, and developed a virtual writing workshop program to mitigate learning loss for K-12 students. Help them continue to build creative communities and offer quality writing instruction to the students who need it most by visiting, austinbatcave.org.