"On the bald street breaks the blank day"

which, as you'll recognize, comes from one of the bleakest stanzas of Tennyson's In Memoriam, that great Victorian poem of mourning (and eventual hope).  Or: it works for me standing outside my parents' house very early this morning - but dawn was on its way; the dawn chorus was singing - waiting for the Uber to come and collect me and take me to Kingston Hospital.  I couldn't sleep last night, thinking that the phone would ring at any time - which it did, to tell me, gently, that my mother had died peacefully, in her sleep.  So I went to be with her, and my father, and to bring him back (he remains enraptured by the wonders of Uber, and stares at the little moving cars on the screen that magically can be summoned up with a touch).  It's been a long, long day.