Monday

In these soft hours of the night, we take shifts in pairs. I watch the dull shadows from my mother’s knitting lights flicker & dance across the wall, rippling over the crenulations & rounded contours of the breathing tubes, the oxygen machines, the hospital bed. I have watched her hold her head sideways over my dad’s chest to plumb for breath. Just in case, here in the elongated wilderness of night, he slips quietly from us, as none of us expect him to do. 

It is Monday. I have been here a week, & Dad has been home with us in hospice for six of those days. We occupy ourselves in the ordinary tasks of tending to dying-- heading down branching trails of planning for eventualities that glimmer in their specificity & suffice for the thin delusion of control that we all grasp after. We are gathering together the kindling for the fire to follow, but we will not know its flame, nor the heat from it, nor the light, nor the shade until we stand before it. 

I have been thinking about how we, all of us, lead small lives, really, but how numinous they are rendered by the undercurrent of love flowing freely through them, gaining foothold, finding purchase & tenderly battling the end stop of eternity. I think of an alpine trickle cleft through weathered stone, swelling in flow & flux, burgeoning into the strong vein of river that courses its way unto the sea, into water’s end. We are such fulgent light, piercing & beautiful & rhapsodic, & then we are not. An imprint upon an eyelid. A breath shivered through a body. But love bears our name, & endures.

Rain falls outside the window. The trees go about their slow growth. The birds alight on the feeders & turn their heads & take the measure of the world. Still itself. Still itself.