I use this blog to tell stories to my friends about life in Ireland, but I spent the month of November in Santa Cruz and wanted to a California story.
My mom died in May of 2020—of old age, not covid. She died in the same hospice she had worked in, in the bed she choose for its view of the garden. Despite covid regulations, the hospice allowed my dad and two sisters to sit with her in her last days. The best kind of death.
Like most families that year, mine delayed her memorial. Flights resumed and I was able to fly home for it. My three sisters and I arrived anxious. Our memories of family gatherings are not unalloyed, but that’s nothing special either. When I was back in Ireland, what I most remembered about the funeral was how we have lived long enough to heal ourselves.
The Awesome Power of Glacial Exfoliation
In their sixth decade,
Four girls gather at their mother’s funeral.
Reconciling in a Clovis trailer park,
Not one cries openly.
Each sister prays for compassion.
Each sister strains to be seen.
Each sister hungers for cultivation.
Each sister lacks what she lost.
Each sister sinks as the accolades approach.
“Your mother was a saint.”
“All the nurses looked to her.”
“Your mother cared for my father.”
“She was so generous.”
In secret the sisters say:
She was a lovely person.
I wish I had known her.
After the funeral meal, cousins find their footing
In the scree of occult disclosures.
A gossip game of chutes and ladders.
Sex and shame, up and down the family tree.
In their sixth decade,
Four women arrange for the photo.
They smile and summit the peaks of their hearts
Deep like mountains where torrents of
Truths eroded devotion and anything not a mountain.
The next day the sisters visit Yosemite.
Leaving dad in the double-wide
Alone with his whiskey and rosary.
In the pioneer graveyard near the waterfall
The youngest sister cries out.
Some trouble with her contact lens.
If she can’t fix it, she’ll be blind the rest of the day.
Her eyes are dry.
The oldest sets her face to the wind
Coming off the cascade.
Her rheumy eyes large and scary
Like mom’s.
The youngest holds her contact lens
Like a fey goblet on her fingertip.
She touches it to the eldest’s cheek.
Once, twice, thrice, and again.
It fills with tears.
She makes a practiced gesture toward her eye.
The sisters resume their ramble
Clear-sighted, high-hearted.
You have a marvelous way of crafting a sentence, that takes me by the hand, and shows me where we're heading, yet, still, when I get there, I want to look back in wonder. How did she do that?
ReplyDeleteThank you, Marc. I didn’t see this until now.
ReplyDeleteHow do I do it? It seems like hard work when I’m writing a poem, but when it is done, it feels like grace.