I think Cathy Song has a beautiful way of finding the gift in death, in what is left behind.
My Mother’s Last Gift
My mother’s last gift
was to slow dying down
until we could catch up.
Had her death been sudden,
we would have mourned an illusion,
a picture we took and framed
and chose to remember.
We would not have seen
ourselves in the fullness of her light.
Into dementia she slipped,
becoming brighter.
She lost the defenselessness
she maintained in health,
the core of her becoming
more real than the one
that fended off disappointments,
a husband’s unhappy harangue,
the chiming insults of children.
We took it personally,
as if she decided simply
one day not to speak.
She would outlast us,
watching us in silence
while we spent ourselves,
a penny for her thoughts.
There were not enough pennies in the world
to change her mind.
We substituted our thoughts
for hers, speaking for her,
always putting words into her mouth.
However blasphemous the claims,
she did not correct us.
Once the small explosions ignited
there was no stopping the fuse,
the deceptive length of it
the time we needed
to grasp the decline of the body,
the enemy invisible, striking at first
in midsentence, then in midstride,
and retreating to withhold more damage
that by dawn would be apparent.
Propping her from buckling
under the crippling descent,
the pressure of our will
caused more harm that the internal
detonations that left her skin
powdery, so easily bruised.
We wanted her back
in her old form,
the one we counted on
as a receptacle for our scorn,
our stubbornness, our imaginary heroics,
unable to be grateful
for what was transpiring,
what we did not deserve.
Toward the end we would sit,
simply sit, by her side,
asking nothing of her.
She floated transcendent,
out of but not quite the body,
coarse, and determined as the ground.
She became lighter as the body
solidified, purifying herself
in the last days of life on earth.
It was difficult to meet her gaze.
Not fully of this world,
she floated above the body,
taken up with the concentration
such art required.
In her presence we became more real
to ourselves than we had ever been.
As if manifesting her true potential,
she shook herself free of us,
having led us thus far.
- Cathy Song