fading

Two weeks ago mom was answering the phone and bathing herself.

Three days ago mom was sitting up and holding the baby.

Yesterday mom was able recognize me and exchange a few words.

This morning opening her eyes a quarter of an inch took a whole body effort, and I don't know what she saw.

She's on a diet of morphine and ice chips. The lady said she hasn't eaten anything since a half cup of rice pudding the previous morning.

The sitter was cleaning and trimming mom's fingernails and maintaining a stream of bubbly chatter even as she adjourned to the kitchen to 'give us a minute'.

She handed me a silver lozenge stamped with a spiral, hanging from the same sort of chain as my grandfather's dog tags. Mom's necklace. It had started wearing a red groove in her white soapstone flesh.
Such a trivial thing.
Now it sits in my shirt pocket like a stone dredged up from the bottom of the sea.

My uncle called but she's past using the telephone and I wasn't much better.
I think he's a decent person, but the whole family was made to drink from the same poisoned well and ever after have sweated and tossed in shared delirium.

I've engaged my mom because she's my mom and no amount of therapy can lever that boulder out of the middle of the road. The smaller rocks I just drive over or swerve around.


Before I left I stood by the bed in the corner of the living room and petted her cap of sweaty gray curls, just now growing out out from the weeks and months of useless chemotherapy. Her hands belong on a marble statue, cold to the core, but her head is still hot, hair striving outward as everything else collapses in sections.

I said "I forgive you," even though she can't hear me.
And maybe she said "I'm sorry," even though I can't hear her.

elliott

they're waking you up to close the bar
the street's wet you can tell by the sound of the cars
the bartender's singing clementine
while he's turning around the open sign
dreadful sorry clementine
though you're still her man
it seems a long time gone
maybe the whole thing's wrong
what if she thinks so but just didn't say so?
you drank yourself into slo-mo
made an angel in the snow
anything to pass the time
and keep that song out of yr mind
oh my darling
oh my darling
oh my darling clementine
dreadful sorry clementine