A Dying Woman

This was a very sick woman I was looking at,
encountered in a late night hallway,
dimly lit from a night light appendaged to an ungrounded outlet.
She was hairless and I was unprepared for the sight of her without her wig, or hat.
Her bathrobe tightened around her as if it was the only thing holding her together.

And I was scurried out of the bathroom,
urgently interrupted
doing my best to comply.
It was the first and only time I had seen her in distress,
unable to hide how sick she was.
It was the first time I was aware of the limits of hope and redemption.
It was the last time I spoke to her.

I was fifteen then,
and the remnants of my failing childhood
no match for the cruel intricacies of death.
Stoicism too available to my budding adulthood looking for a hiding place.
And I used it well and disappeared.

In the remaining days I was absent
though my footsteps be heard
and though I boarded the school bus
just outside the front door of the farm house.
I was not there.
I would never be there.
I could not be,
not then.

and I never talked to her after,
she was something else then
not my aunt, though she wanted to be.


A dying woman.
And me old enough to know what death was,
too young to know what it might mean.
And so it was that too soon after,
before I could come to terms with the
realities of impending death
it was no longer so.

The day of death,
the funeral,
just rituals and movements
things that had to be done.
the shock lost in rehearsal,
the pain lost in deferral.

Still today some thirty years later
I struggle to grasp the full reality of it all.
I see the changed lives,
the endless cascade of absence
the broken illusion of wholeness
forever shattering thoughts of what might have been, exposing the deficiencies of what remained,
mostly exposing my own incompleteness,
and the lost opportunities of those last days,
because of the fear of what I could not see,
and the truth of what I could.

And though she was courageous
covering her pain as best she could from those who loved her,
and though I only saw her distress in one brief encounter in a dimly lit hallway,
because of my empty spaces, and broken completion,
she is always with me,
always waiting with absolution,
which I will never ask for.