About "These Five Hours"

Have you ever reached perfection?
I did
once.

I took a pain and reduced it for hours

simmering until it thickened

into something that could stand on its own.

It took few words

and less literacy

but it perfectly encapsulated 

me, us, then.

Perfection needed only one ingredient.

Death.

The Grief Fire

I'm standing by a grief fire
that's been wanting to burn.

I finally laid the kindling

and hash-tagged small sticks, 

struck a match, and let 'er rip.

It lit up like a mid-January Christmas tree

the flames hungry for reconciliation.

I fed it more...

memories, hopes, wishes,

just twigs really

hot and hungry, wishing to escalate.

I grabbed the logs next...

the heaviest oak of priceless loss

that would burn relentlessly hot

until expended.

I wanted ash.

I wanted that flame obliterated,

but it had a life span I couldn't rush.

The embers kept their glow,

photo edges curling, snaps of time melting like wax

every dream drenched in gasoline.

I stood intimately close

gazing as my hair burned, my face gone,

dying along with the fire

and daring a Pheonix rise.

"With Sympathy" is not sufficient...

A blogger (a friend) I know, have known, since before...
Oh man...to say it
BEFORE

Since before the world became a incoherent swirl
since before there was a name spoken
not yet engraved

Oh GOD
I hate this part of life...
release, without consent, to
to...

More than death
what startles me is my sorrow.

We've not met
I've not held your infant
but he grew beneath me in the words you cradled him in
and I knew him
well...I knew him through you
well...I knew you through this
and I knew this through many

And the same avenue that brought him to life for me
takes his life.

Words.

And there are none.


I'm so proud of him, you, her.
So little
and yet so much he became...
becomes...
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His Perfect Ending

Where do I place him? The bed, the chair? Shall I center him like a television that we all gather around? Should I frame him in the hallway, where we will be sure and brush against him in the narrow passage? Do I hide him in the spare room so my denial can bake itself into a cheese lasagna on the kitchen counter?

What should I wear...his favorite dress, my naked skin? God how I hate my naked skin. God how he loves it. So for him, for me, this last vision....what? Naked. Clothed. Shit, I should have started that diet...been a lasting vision in one of those negligees that show everything instead of this saggy ass frump. Bermuda shorts and a low v-neck. Yeah. I guess. Shit.

How do I touch him? His face. Do I cup his sweet face? Do I hold his hand? Why does that seem so patronizing? Should I place his hand on my breast, pass my beats across the divide of dying? Should I lay against his side with our hearts together, his slowing, mine racing inevitably towards panic? Can he feel that? Should I show it,? Should I make a pretense at calm? Fuck calm. I can't hold my tears. He knows I can't. Why do I try? Why can't I shut up my mind and just sit with this, let it be it's own thing, watch it like a movie played out in super grain 8mm. Silent.

Do I call the children in? How do I share this? I don't want to share this. I have to pee. What if that's the moment? They say loved ones wait until you're out of the room. That's what they say. Right? What if he dies as I wipe? It's too common...too common a moment for death. I won't pee. I'll hold it. I'll pee right here in these fucking bermuda shorts. I'll void myself into the space he'll leave and maybe it won't seem so empty.

Oh hell! I can't control this. There is no way to set this stage and perfect this ending. Look at him! He's just watching me like I'm a fly buzzing around the room. "Land. Land. Land." He's amused. Doesn't even look sad. He looks amused. It's his death. Sheesh! Just ask.

"What do you want, babe....?"



(Our friend Matt W is home dying. One day...three...maybe four. I know nothing of these last moments for them. I just imagine. This is how my mind works itself into a state, whether it be over death, or a choice between brown or cream plates. Racing. I wish it would stop. Will I be buzzing around your death or able to just be still in it? I am wondering, and I'm sad.)
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A Good Death

There is no single best kind of death. A good death is one that is "appropriate" for that 'being'. It is a death in which the hand of the way of dying slips easily into the glove of the act itself. It is in character, ego-syntonic. It, the death, fits the 'dying'. It is a death that one might choose if it were realistically possible for one to choose one's own death. - Edwin Shneidman, A Commonsense Book of Death

I thought he was dead. I reached down, wanting to touch him, wanting to feel the delicacy I saw. But my gentle stroke brought an arch to his body and my error was realized. Not dead, but passing over. Surely now I could hear him gasp...labor in these last moments. He was on his back, dying like a turtle...like a slow, heavy turtle. This was no good death. To die on the doorstep of an ugly building on an ugly swath of cement, could not be a good death. To be grounded in the path of footfalls, people who come and go and rarely look anywhere but into the screens of their cell phones...could not be a good death.

I thought of burial, perhaps to honor him. I wanted to honor this dragonfly for Marion. I reached down, but saw movement again and I was afraid. I have never been comfortable keeping watch with the dying. There is a choreography to it that I have not learned. I am even less comfortable with the dead. I remember my husband touching his dead father's hand...holding it. I could not. I remember his mother, and my sister in laws who dressed her embalmed body, and set her hair...loving in it...but I could not. The shell of a person frightens me. They are no longer of it, nor can I be. Not yet.

I got a piece of paper and gently turned him over onto the page. His leg scritched against it momentarily, as if to write, perhaps an epitaph. Burial now seemed a ludicrous idea. Carrying him carefully against the shield of my body, concerned the breeze would send him free falling, I preserved his pristine wings and unmarked body.  I found a shaded section of the parking lot with foliage he could decay into with dignity. I left him, coward that I am, to die there in the arms of a flower. But I think he prefered it, having been at home with her all his life.
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Four Nineteen

Normalcy quivers, like tickled flesh, but nothing so common as that. I shrug off the chill and flip over in bed, one wary eye to the clock. 4:19 AM. I expect nothing different than to wake to these haunted numbers. The set of my alarm has little sway to the moment my eyelashes flutter their acknowledgement of numeraled ghosts. I rise, dress, and wonder….perhaps today?

Hot water strains through a French press as I check my e-mail and see the alert blinking, blinking…I have mail. Only one at 4:19 PM yesterday from my son…”Love you….” He rarely writes. I save the message as an anomaly and wonder if he'll call today.

Work is insignificant as always, and I spend the day on a spreadsheet of items. At 4:00 I crack my neck audibly, lean back in my chair and release the gas in my knuckles. I notice, only then, that the last line entered is row 419. I consider adding one more entry, or deleting the last, but there are forces at work, far beyond any remediation.

I glance to my iPod, note the song which auto shuffle has chosen for the end of my work day… The song is exactly 4 minutes and nineteen seconds long. I rub my arms as a louder disquiet settles between aging bones.

I was born a mistake. On April 19, a child was born into the world, unwanted, ill conceived in passion too large for consequence and handed off to a well intended institution. There has been a bill of lading, as yet unpaid. Perhaps tonight?

I gather my things, head home in a resigned direction as the miles click off the moments left on a declining meter. I stopped talking about the numbers after awhile. No one believed me. I want to agree it is coincidence that brings this date to life…or death. I look at the dashboard…4:19 PM as the strains of Joe Bonamassa's Had To Cry Today come through the radio...♫It's already written that today will be one to remember...♫

I stare too long.

“Mom?….I’m home…”

“She’s not here.”

“Where is she?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t been able to reach her on cell….”

“She’s usually home by 5:00.”

“Yeah. She usually is.”

**************************************

(It's my birthday. The frequency with which these numerals show up in sequenced order in my life is hair raising. In habitually morbid fashion I began to wonder if the date of my birth would become the time or date of my death. Yeah....I know.... of course I'm being melodramatic, but even the world wide web has similarly macabre ideas.)

"Is April a cursed month? While there’s no scientific evidence readily available to show that a specific calendar date has any effect on human behavior, it is oddly coincidental that such a small range of dates (April 16 - 20) contains some of the darkest moments in US History." Specifically of April 19, just to name a few:

4.19.1775 - Revolution begins with the "shot heard round the world"

4.19.1861 - Lincoln orders blockage of Confederate ports, starting the Civil War

4.19.1993 - Waco

4.19.1995 - Oklahoma City Bombing

4.19.2010 - Gulf Oil Disaster