absent
When last I saw her frail stroke-ridden
body motionless in that hospital bed,
blue eyes staring up at me,
I hoped she didn’t know.
“Don’t send me there when I grow old”
Mom had said so many times.
Remembering how I’d taught her to drive
our first automatic transmission station wagon,
watching her lurch down the walk
twisting her polio-shriveled right leg
onto the front seat, good leg on the gas,
eyes peering over the steering wheel.
Gray roots of her blond hair visible
on the white pillow. Sugar-laden sustenance
dripping into her diabetes-withered vessels,
killing her while feeding her.
Tears forcing me to stop on the road
from Baltimore back to New York.
My bantam rooster father no longer
breathing fire, shoulders sagging,
bending to kiss her one last time.
Jonathan, my youngest, was with her at the end.
She’d smiled, murmured his name and exhaled.
I was in New York working. Damn. Damndamn. Damn.
Words of My Father 
Jonathan (son #3) said,
14 September 2006 at 3:42 pm
My grandmother passed away in the early 1980s. My father took some liberty with events. I wasn’t there when she died. But my name, weakly murmured from across the room, calling to me as I looked out the window, perhaps a day or so before, was the last word she ever spoke.
I confess that this poem stuck in my mind as I decided (as per his wishes) to bring my father home from the nursing home he had been living in for about a month, to spend his final 5 months at home. My middle brother had arranged his stay there, during a visit to Colorado (where my father lived in our house) from Baltimore, where my brother lived. It had become clear he couldn’t stay at home alone anymore, but my brother was unable to stay with him.
I had been in the Czech Republic on a Fulbright grant with my wife and first son (#2 was in gestation). I turned down an extension on my grant, which would have kept me there through September, in order to return home (as it turned out a couple weeks earlier than initially planned) in order to tend to him.
I can’t say that those months were always pleasant, for him, or me. I can’t say that I always exhibited the patience I would have liked. It is very hard to tend to your dying father, all the while tending to a young son, and pregnant wife, while trying to finish a dissertation. But then, life is not always easy. It was the right thing to do, even if I sometimes fell short of the mark. I’m sure my father saw that. I console myself with the thought that he knew I would never have to write such a poem as this myself.
bloglily said,
16 September 2006 at 5:33 pm
He’s a wonderful poet, your father. I like that last line very much.