I sit on the patio where the
fine delicate scent of her flowers
drifts in the air
The hospice nurse’s hand on my shoulder
tells me the machines and tubes
have been removed
When I enter
she is lying quietly
but her eyes seek me out
It is time
I don’t want to get the ring past the knuckle
But she opens her eyes, insisting
I place it in the dresser drawer
With the jewelry and medications
All the things now set aside
I want to gather them up and
shower her with
gold, silver, white pills, and blue
But with a gesture she would
clatter them all to the floor
The afternoon light moves slowly
as I pace the room
I want to speak from my heart
but this tires her
So I tell her of family and friends
while the sun moves across the floor
and brushes the edge of her bed
We’re beyond words now
So I sit by the bed and sing
Backstory
Everybody’s mother is remarkable. Mine was no exception. A Navy wife in the old school, she regularly spent years as a single mother raising two, then three kids, while my father was deployed. Her quiet resoluteness was legendary, within the family and beyond. At 96 – eight years after my father, the love of her life – and dependent on medication, she took control of her last days. She stopped her medications.
My brother, sister, and I were with her for most the weeks that followed. My sister and I were with her on her last day. This poem comes from that experience. From an emotional point of view, there is nothing more to say.
Regarding the poem itself, I knew that honoring those moments required both living with their specificity, while also crafting an environment that communicated the emotional reality to the reader. This required letting go of the physical reality in some ways. This is one of the hardest and most important lessons I’ve learned as a poet. You start with something real and personal, but in the crafting of a poem, the demands of that communication must be honored.
As you read these backstories, you’ll hear me repeat that however much a poem tells a story, it is not a story. I love my sister dearly, and having her with me that day remains with me forever, but having two people present was a complication that only distracted.
I didn’t specify a child/parent relationship in the poem. This gives more room for a reader to connect it with their experience of loss.
We had many health providers with us that day (bless them), but there were no medical machines keeping her alive. But removing the machines effectively communicates the intentionality of the events more effectively than diving into medication regimens.
I generally have a strong idea of the images, themes, language, and line structure of a poem before I start to write, but I often don’t know where or how they will end. I’m not much of a singer, and I had no intention of having it end with a song. But as I got to that last moment, it felt perfect for the poem.
Emotionally, this poem is, for me, true to the experience. Everything important is included. In the final days, I sometimes spoke to her of “important” things, but she would close her eyes and drift off. I’d speak of her great-grandkids and she’d open them again. Gardening, plants, and flowers were always important to my mother. Several times throughout that day I slipped out to sit quietly with them. She asked us to remove her rings, something I absolutely did not want to do. I didn’t know where to put them, and as I opened a small drawer on her dresser I saw all of the pills she was no longer taking. How I wanted to return both the rings and pills to her. I remember the movement of the sun’s shadows across the floor as a marker of time passing, time that I simply wanted to stop. And then, of course, the profound change in the room after she passed. I still feel that quietness in me.
The last day of the stage performance was the anniversary of my mother’s death. Valerie Vibar, the lead actress on this poem had very recently lost her beloved grandmother. We had a quiet moment of tears before that performance. She’s absolutely wonderful in the film, which was made a few weeks prior, but that last performance was one of the moments you only get in live theatre.