Category: Death and Dying

Accretion/Debridement

When House was new it asked for filling.

We complied with staples and treats and whimsy and hope, in their turns.

Repujado’s required tools are good for nothing else.  Parts of looms lay

akimbo in the nook upstairs.  Clothes of outdated sizes rotate to the back

of ample closets.  Business cards not used, now supplanted by better.  Instruments

upgraded.  Posters outgrown.  A chest with toys untouched for years is colorful

behind the vacuum.  Hats.

When Home comes it will demand spaciousness.

Surfaces easily wiped.  Doors wide enough for chairs and beds and the wagons

with the tubes and beeps.  One dresser with three drawers.  The clothes coming back

from the laundry may not be ours, but we will wear them.

Breathe in.  Breath out.  We open our hands, palms full of oxygen and memories.

 

A Prayer to Black Bile

A humor, though not as humorous as one might hope,

you sit in the shade of my liver,

melancholy incubating in your bitter sack.

You taketh away my French fries and my mayonnaise.

When I sin against you

you waketh me in the witching hour and

maketh me to sit up through the night.

Oh, frost –

Oh, woolly caterpillar –

Oh, harbinger of my imminent winter –

have mercy on me

as you strip from me the luxuries of the flesh.

 

 

 

 

I Don’t Want to be Her, to the End

A bright cake for me to deliver on a rainy day,

pinks and purples as requested,

reading:  Happy Birthday, Dorothy!

The baker asks me which birthday is it?

She’s 98 and in hospice.

I resist the temptation to say, “Her last.”

Her daughter keeps me waiting in the foyer

of the 60’s modern apartment building

with its kidney coffee tables and satellite chandeliers.

Her mouth twists as she takes the cake,

I’m sorry if she’s been a pain in the ass.

Not to me, I’m just delivering cake,

I grin, having been a daughter myself.

 

 

Three from Hospice

The Spread – GN

She’s slim, wearing silk pajamas, weak, purposeful,

folding paper towels into precise fourths

and setting them on the side of the sink.

With the economy of the dying she weighs

the need for each word against its cost to her reserve.

She doesn’t want me to see this.

She doesn’t want her daughter to see this more.

She needs my help.

Peeling back the gauze she says

This is the spread

and for the first time I see cancer, the crab.

Some of it has crawled outside of her skin

and grows there – a mountainous landscape

the diameter of a dinner plate,

hard, red, yellow, raw, oozing, wrong.

Some of it is tenting up the skin nearby.

We work together until it is clean and covered.

I pray to see the beauty beyond the horror.

My prayer is answered until I drive away.

 

Sitting with the Not Dying – MO

No one knows why she’s still here.

Three months without food, two weeks without water,

she has become an anatomy lesson:

dark, fixed pupils in an adamantine face,

the cords tying the bonnet of her skull clearly outlined

on her neck,

veins running like mole tunnels over her forehead,

feet blackening.

She breathes.

I hold her hand,

read to her from her own bible,

the underlined and highlighted bits,

in the hope that she hears and finds comfort.

She might wish I’d shut up

so she can finish her business of dying.

I don’t know.  I don’t know.

 

Sitting with the Dead – MS

Margie S. died today, called at 6:15 a.m.

aged 62, surrounded by no one.

A ward of the state since her son went to jail,

she lies naked, covered by a grayish sheet,

no pictures, no teddy bears in sight.

I read her prayers I don’t believe

about I love I do believe.

And the staff in this place

about whom you would think the worst

if you saw them out on the street,

come to touch her body and say good bye.

 

 

Gone

Gone Gone Gone

The scenery falls too fast

from this inexorable train;

pastures, houses,

signs unreadable,

license plates unidentified.

When did they tear that down?

People, too, moving,

twist themselves out of our arms

and run;

or take the long, easy glide

from the sky

into that little pond,

there on the left,

gone.

Even our dead,

bodies stilled,

are taken,

disposed of,

gone.

Unable to hold on

our bodies rebel,

cramp,

tear

as if it were our own flesh

gone.

At 77

For Garth

At 77

Coyote has a chest tube

strung from lung to plastic bag,

a ginger colored liquid trickling.

He’s prickly and not too clean,

carved down to sinew

and spots and yellow teeth.

He’s denned himself in

and doesn’t want much company.

I rub his shoulders, feel how the muscles

have let go of the joint.

The nurse comes in and he snarls,

rolling his eyes behind her back

to show me he knows what he’s doing.

He’s alpha still

through bed rails and morphine;

holds up the bottle

to show me how much he’s peed.

Sitting with the Dying – EG

I walk in upon a relay team of elderly siblings

proficient at sitting and loving.

So easily they leave behind their own tasks,

their sewing and the calls of grown children,

to care.

I show them how to draw up the morphine

to the lullaby of the tv laugh track.

I should draw up their patience.

Instead the bull of my own will

kicks and snorts –

wants to trample to dust this outdated cereal,

this stained white doughnut box holding up the trash can,

this bowl with its dusty chocolate,

a dozen bottles, each with an inch of perfume.

Oh how I love to Do Something.