Eight Days
You’d awakened happy
having arrived at your 100th birthday
your yellow, your red roses on the bureau
and the bed table, you asked to be helped
into your purple dress to celebrate,
but then collapsed, lapsed, unwilling even then
to begin the end of it. You had so much
to do and during those last days, we, too, were busy
with your leaving and did not know
about the children taken from their parents
at the border. But last night I heard them crying,
sobbing Papi, Papi. . . I heard them sobbing
and so did anyone who listened. It’s odd the way
dying takes over everything, the tending to one life
on its journey when there are so many crossings,
so many others journeying too. In those first days
I told you stories of the crossings meant to help you
on your way. I told of Charon and his ferry, then
the sun setting over the sea you could walk into,
then another river, the boat, drifting with you in it,
the current carrying you away. Until,
on the third day, I settled on the names, Mother,
Father, Joe and Charlie, Millie and Larry,
Willie and John, sometimes more and sometimes less,
a kind of chant, and because you’d made me
and I’d had no child, I read you what I’d made
of the stories you had told me. I asked if
you remembered how your grandmother,
who’d crossed that border as a twelve year old,
taught the mocking bird to sing? I thought
you almost smiled.
On the fourth morning, you
did not open your eyes, and I started to clean,
to bag what you had already forgotten
in the corners of your room. It was hot, the windows
were open and across the alley men
were on their break sitting on the loading dock
playing music, smoke drifting up. I was talking
to Lorena, the hospice nurse, when I saw
you raise your hand, your eyes wide open though
you were looking somewhere beyond me,
your hand raised, one finger pointing.
You were pointing for a long time.
Did you see them? Were they waiting?
After that, you never opened your eyes again.
Bill helped to bathe you on the fifth day. When
they took the children, reports say no one was allowed
to touch them, to hold their hands as we held yours,
to offer tenderness in their travail. I watched him
lift your arm, guide the cloth over
your blue streams slowing and slowly rub the cream
into your skin as Lorena told him to do. Someone
came and vacuumed while we were out
but Lorena said you did not stir. More family came
and went, talking over and around you as if
it were the party we had planned, and on the fifth day
I understood my brother had not told you
you could go. We always joked you never did
what you did not want to do until he said you should.
Were you waiting, or uncertain? Your boy,
almost eighty, came to tell you on days six and seven.
I don’t know what he said, but on days six
and seven he said it. Your lungs were filling
your breath grew shallower, no food, no water,
no tubes, just your body lessening. Little mother,
your breath grew shallower until it was not
on the eighth day in the morning when
you ceased to breathe. Then, I kissed your forehead
one last time, and soon the young men came
and wrapped you in your white shroud
and took you to be buried in your purple dress.
Listening
Each of my parents died of a stroke.
He wanted a food tube and had it for months
until he didn’t want it and then ten days passed
and he was gone. I visited him four or five
times in the months that he lived, an eight hour
drive each way. He had to listen. He couldn’t
talk back though sometimes I still hear him call me
“Daddy’s little girl” and it makes me feel sick.
Why did I visit him? I had some idea about what
I was supposed to to do. I got it from her
who knew how to sit with the dying
and expected me to sit with him as I would sit
with her. I did. I’m not sure she knew what
had happened to her. At first, she moved her lips
and then she stopped trying. I think she forgot
she was in hospice and expected us to do
something before she remembered we would not.
I miss her voice, just a month ago talking about how
she needed new shoes for church when it was clear
she was never going to church again. In those
first days when I held her good hand, her grip
was so strong, pressing my ring into my finger,
and then it began to lessen until she let go. I cried
sitting by her bed in the hour after she died
when I told Yvonne how I had not been
with my father on his last day. I cried because
even though I did not love him I now believe no one
should die alone. She told me many people do,
but I know she meant many die without family
not without her who bore witness to death after death
because she was called to do so. When I said that,
she didn’t deny it. Neither of them could speak—
both of them had to listen to me—
I wonder if they were tired of that, tired of me
trying to figure out who they were, tired
of me trying to explain them to myself and each other?
