When a Parent Dies
“The path”
As some folks know, and most others don’t, my step-dad Albert, known as Ab, died in June from Parkinson’s and other complications. And that’s pretty much where I’ve been for the last few months.
For the last few months (during Covid), myself and a number of my siblings were making regular 3-4 day long trips to help my mom and Ab out. In a strange twist of scheduling and happenstance, I was running the Black Lives Matter fundraiser while helping carry him along through hospice. It was a weird time, with a public and private schism growing wider and wider. This post, I guess, is part of bridging the divide.
Anyone who’s cared for someone with dementia knows how difficult it can be. They have times when they are very much themselves, cracking jokes and happy to have you around, and they have episodes where they are very much… not themselves. And then one tries to be as patient and calm and kind as one can be with another human.
me and ab, pretty late in the game. back in may.
Everyone’s parents die, so there’s nothing particularly special about that. And yet, of course, it’s always very special, very particular. The bruise is very real. And Covid has made nothing easier— not only because it complicated taking care of him, but even afterwards. It’s a strange and amazing thing to recognize that everyone who has died these last months, everywhere, for anything, not just Covid, doesn’t get a funeral or a wake. So I really feel for those families who have lost someone. I think the seclusion has made the healing harder than it’s had to be.
In between work, and life, and busyness, I’ve been painting and writing. Making sense, I guess. It is a great gift to make paintings and poems. I hope we all don’t forget that. Sometimes we judge them and we decide they’re successful as art objects, but just the act of making can be healing- even subpar work. ;) It’s good to pay attention and to let go and to make something.
Poetry chisels the mind, and painting, perhaps, the eyes. Like almost all good art, they work best when they arrive at their goal sideways, by missing the mark a bit, by not saying what we want to say. Poetry breaks grammar to bind meaning to itself, to make an opening that you can enter through. Painting distorts to simplify, speaks through color to say what words cannot.
I took the reference photos for these paintings while Ab was in the hospital, up in Arnold, before he came home for hospice. These undulating, dry, grassy hills, so close to where I grew up, spoke to me. And here now, they’re helping me. I needed to say things to let them go. So, thank you, to the word and the brush. And thanks for reading.
one of the only “ok” ones. But i want to share the whole experience.
Those Who Remain
After the fact
After the storm
Afterthought
After hours
Afternoon and afterglow
After dark
After the hammer falls
After the last breath
Afterlife and Aftershock
Aftereffect
Afterimage.
After. After.
After.
a burnt out stump with the bark pealing off
The Broken Cup
We waited,
and we listened
as we unmoored the boat.
And we filled that vacuum with love with the singing of love with the giving of love that flows over the broken cup, but sometimes one must
arrive
at the unheeded silence
needed.
We decided to dress him. Jeans and a plaid button-up, with denim over the top. Sleeves rolled up, because that’s how he liked it.
The white tennis shoes, that were comfy and good for a quick walk. And a cap. And the glasses, of course, at the end, that we hooked delicately behind his ears.
He seemed ready.
There is now
no action to do,
no wound now to heal,
no more waiting to be done.
Now we are not waiting.
The storm is inside now.
Now the wind is inside. Listen.
The roar that is outside is inside. We arrive
at where we are.
6.28, 8.13.20
Entangled
Remembering the arrival of rain on a tin roof, the smell of water dripping from a gutter, absolution, an interlude of crickets, the very earth breathing outside my bedroom window on a warm summer night, too warm and dry, too bright, too awake for darkness.
Blue is the sour taste of truth wrapped in a lie.
The release of clarity
for acceptance, warm skin under the palm of your hand, how leaves grow and why they do,
for a hummingbird’s dream,
for memories in the uterus, what it’s like to be a cat and if plants are really closer to God.
More space than matter, it feels good to sit in the sun and make a shadow.
Hoses don’t role in a circle the way we want. All good things end… and the bad ones too. Air is matter, memories malleable and never complete, smell the key that unlocks time’s clock.
It’s still good to do something selfless and not receive praise, to clean up crisp old leaves, to come back,
to not understand,
to hear a bird peck at fruit, the thrum of blood inside the ear, a cat’s purr,
a fire spark in a ring of stones,
a spider’s web,
a dirty window,
rain on an umbrella,
the click of a door opening
8.2.2020
the path
Origami
At first I thought—
the paper should start flat. Waiting. And blank.
I like that kind of paper. The way it smells. The way it rattles when you shake it.
But things never start flat.
We want to think the paper is flat, when we are young we think the paper starts flat,
for that is how we see ourselves then—
without a past
crisp and unblemished
But not to worry. Time folds in on itself.
We want it to be a plan, but it’s
more a path
that we ourselves
carve inward to the broken glass,
a crease
that we ourselves
must make.
We learn to love like we learn to live.
Failure teaches what ambition won’t.
So we line up the two edges, just so,
and make a crease.
Things have to occur in a certain sequence,
one after another.
And like the arms of a father, the other side of the paper folds in on itself—
Now we are the other side.
Now we are the love presumed.
9.5.20