I am just emerging from the portal, tunnel, journey that was my mother dying. Peacefully, beautifully, devastatingly on May 2nd. I share this poem which is the beginning of a larger writing I scribed while she was in a coma for two days before she was removed from life support and died. The picture was taken by my daughter, Karina.
Coma, Comma
I play the word game Wordle on my phone
as I wait for a flight to visit my mother
who has had a massive stroke.
Our family shares updates with emojis
of praying hands and pink hearts.
I start the five letter word game
with lives and the answer is delta
and beats which commences in arise
and talks which culminates not in saint as I’d like, but faint,
which is what happened to her.
My brother, the story goes,
rolled her onto a rug and put her in the car
to take her to the emergency room.
My youngest brother’s ashes have not yet been scattered.
Do they need to be?
Can another family member die while one is unhonored?
How do we remain as ghosts, when alive, once dead?
My step father’s ashes were dusted in Lake Tahoe
and my uncle in the hills above Santa Barbara.
So many though I don’t know of -
my grandmothers, and their mothers, and theirs,
my father, his father and his.
I begin to imagine them blending,
becoming sedimentary rock, with petroglyphs carved upon.
I have been thinking about what it means to have a body
and how we still can be with those who have left theirs.
My mother spends her days tending
tender fussy things - roses,
intricate quilt patterns, a swirl of small dogs.
It seems fitting to write eulogies while we are still living.
The deck shuffles with the news of her stroke
and we check our own readiness.
At the Sacramento airport there is a new art piece
made of three ladders of glass,
the rungs are etched feathers lifting skyward.
The piece is titled Wings of Transition.
Is that what is happening? Mom are you leaving?!
I am wearing sweats that are tight,
look a camel toe, I gestured to my husband,
not knowing yet this will be my death doula outfit.
What the living do - worry about outfits,
get comfortable when we can.
There were already ghosts in her house.
My daughter felt them when we visited a month ago.
We asked to sit outside and my mother offered us Pringles,
even though I wasn’t eating carbs,
I took the salty tongue-shaped chip and let it melt against my tongue.
It is all we can do sometimes (most times),
offer sustenance in pretty bowls.
I took great pleasure in the butter mints
(like little pieces of broken chalk) in my grandmother’s candy dishes.
Decades later it was my turn,
her back crocked like the head of her cane
she was too ashamed to use.
I’d bring her crackers and cheese on a plate
where she sat on the couch,
away from the festive preparations of holiday dinners.
I’d share the easy parts of my life
and ask few questions of hers.
The birds were a twitter at my mother's bird feeders,
we spoke of those, the dogs, the weather.
I will write later about her death,
but in this poem she is still living,
I am on my way to her
lamenting already how in some ways
she was already dead to me,
how I didn’t really see her,
perhaps I couldn’t, until now.
There are lots of commas in this coma poem,
(the etymology of comma means to cut off),
and an overuse of qualifiers as well,
really and perhaps and sometimes.
I usually delete them, poetry must be definitive,
but they’ve all insisted on being here.