Category: family and loss
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Elegy for a Heart Worn Smooth by the River
I knew my mother-in-law for twenty-eight years before she died this October of respiratory failure at 95 years old, presumably as a complication of the colon cancer surgery she’d undergone two days before. The procedure had taken twice as long as anticipated due to numerous unforeseen complexities. A tumor the size of a plum required…
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Last Days
My mother’s end begins, as most bad things have these past six years, with a phone call. A series of them, actually. On Friday, May 25th, her private caregiver S. calls to tell me that she is mostly incoherent and largely unresponsive. On Saturday Anna, my mother’s favorite nurse at the skilled nursing facility, calls…
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Doing the Math
Once upon a time I was a software developer. Somewhere along the way I gave it up to pursue a passion for writing and a quieter life. But if you ask me now what I do, and if I were to answer honestly, I’d have to say, “I am the administrator of my mother’s death. And…
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Mother’s Days
It is the twenty-second of April, and this will be my mother’s fourth hospitalization since the sixteenth of February, trapped in a deadly cycle of infections acquired, beaten back, acquired again. I text my brother and call Stacey, a friend of my brother’s and a private caregiver who for over two years has dedicated herself…
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Eighty Six Christmases
I suppose I feel as if it’s my job, along with taking care of my mother’s financial and medical affairs, to try to convince her that as long as she’s alive there is joy to be found, at least occasionally, somewhere, from something. In pistachio ice cream or lights on a Christmas tree or a…
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Unstately Estate
The week surrounding my parents’ estate sale was, perhaps, more eventful than I might have liked, a trickster deity’s bulleted list of “what can go wrong, will go wrong.” Friday, February 1st Early afternoon Late afternoon Evening Saturday, February 2nd Morning Afternoon Evening Sunday, February 3rd Morning Afternoon Evening Monday, February 4th Morning Afternoon Evening Tuesday,…
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Not Going Gentle
Do not go gentle into that good night,Old age should burn and rave at close of day;Rage, rage against the dying of the light. For the past few months I’ve thought about little else, and I think about it gingerly: Dylan Thomas meant something more noble than this. * * * My eighty-three-year-old father is…
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State of Grace
I. The Burial of the Dead Winter kept us warm, coveringEarth in forgetful snow, feedingA little life with dried tubers. When we pull up in front of my parents’ house I notice the trees first. The almond whose slender shimmering leaves splashed my bedroom walls with pale green light as I studied Eliot, then Heidegger,…
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