My father’s hearing is starting to go;
he chooses to miss things, refuses an aid,
doesn’t hear the 2 a.m. phone
call. I am the one who tells him
five hours later, Lee passed in the night.
I am the one who absorbs his shock
and sob. I thought he was prepared
but bad news is like that. She is the second
wife he has survived, the first my mother
twenty-five years ago. When I arrive
at his door that day, we make our usual
resemblance of an embrace, his eighty-eight
year old frame bent into a C, keeping
his heart from me. We sit side by side on the sofa,
the vintage flowered wallpaper suddenly
alive as if communing with Lee’s wild
garden outside the front window, the roses
bloom that week. I rub his bony back like
he is my child. The only other time I saw
him cry, at LAX arrivals,
my daughter three weeks old, my mother
two weeks gone. Me seeing him, him seeing
mine, all that living and dying, all that
unreasonable pain.
I missed my mother’s funeral, too soon
after birth to fly. My father tells me he is the same sad
now as then and I feel betrayed. My parents
married forty-one years, isn’t time how you
measure grief? He writes a eulogy
for Lee, then falters, I agree
to stand in for him. He depends on me
that way. I take him to doctor appointments,
repeat orders. He does what he likes, ignores
the rule about salt, declines a daily walk.
We know he won’t live forever, but jesus
he has to try. He returns home, lives with my
brother in the old house. Everyone else
helps. Some days I feel like seaweed
come loose from the ocean floor, unmoored,
drifting away until you can’t see me.
I am no longer the mother.
No one is the mother now.
Stoneboat Literary Journal, Spring 2019