I thought all morning
about his life coming to an end
During the oddly undaunted progress of day
I thought of how I might say goodbye to him
Imagining a reply in traces of dry breath
Surrendered by a swollen heart,
Words over a parched and blistered tongue,
Whistled through the cracked lips,
of a parted languid smile…
My grandfather says,
”I love you darling boy.”
Standing bedside,
feeling lost and small in the foreground
of an infinitely large and still burgeoning moment,
words cower in a shadowy and uncertain corner of my mind
A place of forbidden goodbyes
A place where I dare not go
I wait for thoughts to congeal
A thousand fleeting plans of what to say…
But no words pass between us
Instead he lies there alone despite my company,
Listless, except for a few shudders,
Flinching at white memory flashes of sporadic brain activity
Trying to free himself from the clutches of death,
or life.
Perhaps he’s watching movies of his life behind closed eyes
where it’s me who is dying and not him
Then his eyelids quiver apart
and with whatever will remains,
he begins to slowly mouth inaudible words of love
Blossoms pushing through gnarled weeds
in a 96 year old garden.
His eyes are a glaucous sky, but
I swear I catch a glimpse of blue heaven in them,
with resplendent pinwheels of sun scintillating on the horizon
And in that moment, I am gifted the promise he’d assured me
all those years of youthful angst…
…Brown and black age spots on his wrinkled skin,
effervesce into glistening pebbles
emerging in a rippling stream
His sores and scabs diffuse
into strewn velveteen rose petals,
His gray and brittle waves of hair,
turn to a dusting of sunlit snow powder
blowing from soaring peaks,
His shaking limbs unfold
and sway lithely in a spring breeze
And from a slack mouth, floats notes on melodies
gently lifting the curled trestles of cherubs
His body levitates, like a white linen sail
softly catching an offshore breeze
and snapping to full –
He is beauty rising,
drawing up the lanyards of life
that tether all of us on earth,
forever to his new found heaven.
I revel in the thought that he did it!
He took the putrescent blackness of death
and created a saccharine symphony,
a jubilant celebration to which everyone he ever touched
is invited.
As I walk down the outside steps of that hospital,
away from the Good Samaritan,
I am reunited with the undaunted progress of day
highlighted by the morning sun
glinting on the wind rippled intercoastal waters
We walk on, my family and I,
joyous and tall under this wondrous canopy
cast by this small crooked man;
one who came into this life to change the world
and left accomplishing just that
His perpetual legacy of hope
joins the endless river of time.
Farewell beloved sojourner –
I will forever see you soon.
