Lineage
Pops night, our weekly dinners a new ritual
since Moms died, since we helped her die—
mostly in peace, the type of death you read about
and think: that’s it? To die at home, quietly,
surrounded by loved ones? Seems trivial,
but once you’ve spent time in hospitals
and seen suffering patients unable to sleep,
even when sedated because of the noise,
the nurses doing rounds, random and precise
as only employees dressed in white can be,
you understand: it’s not too much to ask,
but it’s everything, perhaps some type of sign
that you’ve lived a decent life, to be blessed
to expire without chaotic buzzing and frantic eyes
searching for doctors who never arrive;
having the curious luxury of withdrawing
deeply into oneself, inside one’s home,
into one’s own history—and if you’re lucky
a spouse or children standing sentinel,
making certain nothing of this earth’s there
to disrupt your preparation for the next place,
wherever and whatever that is—in silence.
My old man, glistening still from his surgery
(outpatient—his skin cancer transforming him
into a kind of cat, more than nine lives now,
and living proof of the ways we measure death
by the strides we’ve made in delaying it
with medicine and data and lessons learned,
often painfully, from all the unsavory ends
that happened before we were born, heirlooms
worth more than gold, especially if we’re smart
enough to study them like gifts or manuals).
That looks painful, I don’t bother to say,
as if he’d admit it either way, impossible—
like him postponing our meal for any reason
so routine as being sliced open for profit.
Cut myself shaving, he doesn’t say, not simply
because he doesn’t actually say it, but it’s nothing
he’d ever say, his sensibility shaped years ago
by relations even more stubborn and steadfast,
which I regard like the textbooks that troubled me
most as a student: the weight & knowledge of history
something I could appreciate if not actually explain.
And I see him, red and proud standing in front of a wave
during the blissful weeks from summers in the 70s and 80s,
when he was, impossibly, younger than I am now (asking:
was he ever that young? Could I ever have become this old?)
And I know, fortune, or fate, or genetics aside, his resilience
is inherited from unfathomable days when our ancestors died
without their boots on, outdoors, never mind in hospitals,
and if I’ve discerned a single thing about living this life
it’s to savor these moments with humility and awe,
even as I think of my mother admonishing him
about the sun, saying, it gives life but hastens death
(she said it a different way, but I’d have to tell another
story to describe it), and him scoffing, in his way, not
stubborn so much as busy growing into his skin,
even as it burned and turned on him, the way our bodies do,
occasionally many years before we’re ready for them to.
It’s not too late, I think, watching him hold his drink, steady
if slower, fully here if already on his way elsewhere, or else
pushing away that urgency as it assails him from the inside—
nature, unlike the doctors—always reliably on time, I grasp
the past has prepared me for the present: he’s still teaching me.
My mother’s third child
It seemed ominous the day she felt that first stirring,
well past menopause, and understood, instinctively:
there was a presence inside her that could not be
a baby: she was too old, unless it was a miracle—
however tardy or undesired. But also, her faith
prepared her to appreciate that blessings will happen
when we neither expect nor are in any way prepared
to receive them; she thought especially of the virgin
mother who had to reconcile a father and husband
who was also God or acting in his stead: savior & friend.
My mother did not think immediately of the Holy Spirit
but her own mother—who’d also felt unwelcome stirrings
of a sudden growth, a pain that could not be borne—
a dread consummating what she’d always feared, that thing
not signaling new life but its opposite, itself the worst
thing any of us must prepare for, destiny or simply bad luck;
a curse that could not be killed but maybe removed or shrunk
or stymied, something requiring highly paid professionals
to manage and explain, even as it made her blind and helpless,
not unlike a fetus in the womb, following instinct in reverse,
falling farther inside herself, adapting to an unfamiliar state
where one stops thinking, no longer breathes, and ceases being.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
