Mother in Hospice on Father's Day

Stained Glass of Chapel / Meditation Room
SECU Hospice Care Center, Mountain Valley Hospice and Palliative Care, Yadkinville, NC

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I’m writing on Father’s Day. My father has been dead since late 1977 and my mother is dying. She has entered hospice, with good days and bad days. She has kept her wits and her memories from the distant past and from yesterday. She eats little, sleeps a lot, and on her better days she wakes for a few hours ready to reminisce and joke. But these days are becoming fewer, the hours of conversation diminishing. She is a good patient, asking only that she be kept comfortable.

Since her first battle with lymphoma in 1994, and especially after the second, more serious lymphoma in 2002, she's been setting her affairs in order. In the last few years, she has gradually had to give up everything that gave her pleasure and fulfillment in life, and now she is eager to reunite with my father who died in 1977. Her mind is clear and, to the extent possible, she's going out on her terms.

In the last few days, new poems have come to me and old poems have presented themselves for revision; they are not strictly speaking about her, but about our common lot.

The death of someone we love invites us to consider the difficulties of existence, for believers as well as everyone else. I like poetry that does not conceal the fallenness of the world we live in, but I love poetry that honors and magnifies its imperfect beauty.

This revision reflects the malice we often see in the fallen world:

Cutlip
 
The cutlip minnow’s mouth
is designed for knocking out
the eyes of harmless passing fish
into a covered dish

as in our mouth the tongue
is adapted for the art--
agree to call it out as hellish--
of breaking lovers’ hearts:

Nature’s red in tooth
and verb, et cetera.
Eyes and hearts are both delish
in Life’s eatery.

The world may have its sharp edges, but Mom is at peace. As a child, she was walking home one evening when a giant fireball descended from the sky and seemed to land in the woods behind a ridge. She expected it to burst into flames. She ran home, frightened, thinking the end of the world had come. Now her end has come, and she is not frightened. She is eager to reunite with my father now dead almost 48 years. She does not want to be distracted from her purpose.

Times and customs change in a long life. In her more than 90 years, Mom must have written and received hundreds of letters, and until very recently she continued to send Christmas and birthday cards. She wondered why her younger grandchildren and great grandchildren hardly ever sent a card or letter, but I explained that it’s a custom the young have abandoned. She does appreciate their texts and likes to respond. She gave up emails some time ago; they were famous among her family for their terseness. One I received read something like this: “Madalene has died. The funeral is on Thursday.” Madalene was her sister. Her death was expected, we knew the church where the funeral would take place, so perhaps no more needed to be said.

I am old enough to have belonged to the end of the letter-writing era, and indeed my son and I still occasionally exchange letters. Here is a new poem about love letters, especially those written but not sent or received but not read, both paradigmatic for communication in our fallen world. Mom told me some years ago that she would destroy the letters exchanged with Daddy, but I don’t know if such is the case.
 
Dead Letters

Pronounced man and wife: one in a black top hat
and tails, the pale one dressed all in white.

Marry death and divorce life. Eat the apple
and the seeds, the crisp flesh white

as the edge of a stamp, the precisely scalloped
lace-trimmed tulle dress in white

on a letter that can’t be mailed: “Dear Rabbit, you were
my only, my heart, without you I bleed white.”

In time our vain longings will be over,
when Jesus says, The field is white--

go to it, angels in black top hats, snaths,
and scythes: swing blades and lay in swathes the white

stuff of fodder and bread, bedding and brooms,
fuel to heat hell by burning a hot white.

Sing first the blade, then the ear,
then the full corn shall turn white

as Queen Anne’s ruff collar, dandelion heads,
milk-thistle’s sap oozing milky white--

all scythed flat—and a sliced through letter
with its cancelled stamp on a field of white.*

It arrived at noon, was rubbished unread by night,
blooded passion now faded illegibly white.
 
         * The stamp images have been borrowed from Walter Benjamin.
 
Mom has communicated clearly and simply what she wants now—to be kept comfortable and to be allowed to slip away. When she was in the hospital, before being transferred to hospice, she made quite a few requests, some material—Involving property and vehicles; some more emotional, including the disposition of some items of sentimental value; and some practical, like taking out the trash and recycling. Her instructions were clear. We are endeavoring to carry them out. When we asked about important papers, she knew where they were.

A friend called me today and reminded me of something that I know too well—new losses deepen as they bring to mind old losses. Here is another new poem recounting (and fictionalizing somewhat) an incident from many years ago that I just heard about. The protagonist is my father, someone rarely far from my thoughts:

 
Life List
 
The black cherries were in fruit. The tops
of our two trees were thick with birds. We’d
never seen their like. The spyglass mislaid
somewhere in our rummage, I started up
the tree, but the birds scattered. I was raised
by Daddy to use the tools I had at hand,
to worry a problem like a redbone hound
     with a raccoon. I fired at noonday….

Subtle crest, yellow belly, a bandit’s
black mask, and red chevrons on her wingtips:
cedar waxwing, we found it in the book.
Would it have been better if I hadn’t?
Murdering a beauty did make me sad,
     but beauty made me have to look.

Finally, great events in our lives invite us to seek inner and outer quiet. Mom is now asleep most of the time or hovering between sleep and wakefulness. A few days ago, she was enjoying the chatter of her children in the room; now she has asked for quiet as she prepares for the journey.


Jaguar Preserve, Belize
 
The slick clay road,
the bone-white puddle
of butterflies on a tire-
flattened black toad:
 
we parked and walked.
Wings beat
around us as they rose
arresting talk.
 
Wings a hair’s breadth
from my lips
kept them from spewing words
on beauty and death.
 
 
Prufrock growing old dared wear his trousers with the bottoms rolled. As I grow older, I find I have the courage, or temerity, to speak of beauty, goodness, and truth without irony. If we are not here to increase our intimacy with the realities endorsing these terms, why are we here?

He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God? (Micah 6:8).


In our daily lives, practicing these virtues looks pretty humble: Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world. (Epistle of James 1:27)


Is not this the fast that I have chosen?
to loose the bands of wickedness,
     to undo the heavy burdens,
and to let the oppressed go free,
     and that ye break every yoke?
Is it not to deal thy bread to the hungry,
     and that thou bring the poor that are cast out to thy house?
when thou seest the naked, that thou cover him;
     and that thou hide not thyself from thine own flesh?

Then shall thy light break forth as the morning,
     and thine health shall spring forth speedily:
and thy righteousness shall go before thee;
     the glory of the Lord shall be thy rearward [rearguard].

Then shalt thou call,
     and the Lord shall answer;
thou shalt cry,
     and he shall say, Here I am.
If thou take away from the midst of thee the yoke,
     the putting forth of the finger, and speaking vanity;
and if thou draw out thy soul to the hungry,
     and satisfy the afflicted soul;
then shall thy light rise in obscurity,
     and thy darkness be as the noon day:
and the Lord shall guide thee continually,
     and satisfy thy soul in drought,
     and make fat thy bones:
and thou shalt be like a watered garden,
     and like a spring of water, whose waters fail not.
And they that shall be of thee shall build the old waste places:
thou shalt raise up the foundations of many generations;
and thou shalt be called, The repairer of the breach,
     The restorer of paths to dwell in. (Isaiah 58:6-12)
 
After retiring from as a speech therapist in the schools, Mom volunteered at a soup kitchen, a hospice, at church (she had a responsible position at the age of 80), and more. She lived a full life and now she is ready for the more abundant life that awaits.