Post
by Lightning Rod » November 26th, 2009, 6:54 pm
Thank you Doreen
Here is a letter that I wrote to a friend upon the event:
Gene,
Mom passed yesterday evening at home. We had only moved her here from the hospital that morning. She was visibly glad to be back in her own environment. The hospice workers were very helpful. She had been home about six hours when she died. I was glad for her. Her existence had been miserable for too long. My picture of her will be forever young. It has been very hard to look at her in her shriveled and palsied condition these past months. She was so beautiful in life.
I had prepared myself for this event every day for two years. I'm amazed she held on for so long. She had ceased to be any semblance of the being she wanted to be, the person she saw herself as. When she went I had already bidden her farewell many times in my heart because she had been leaving little pieces of herself along the path for years like Gretyl trying to remember her way home. I had long been rehearsing the steps to the grief dance in my imagination, so the concrete event wasn't terribly sad or traumatic for me.
But when I had gotten over the shock of her actually dying and while I was waiting for the authorities to arrive from the hospice, I was overcome with this crazy urge. I knew they would come soon and carry her away and I would never see her again. No, no, the urge wasn't Oedipal. The urge was to paint a clown's face on her. I pictured her in whiteface with amazed eyes and a cherry nose and an exaggerated purple fixed smile. It wouldn't have taken much makeup. It was one of those shamefully wicked fantasies that makes you want to pimp-slap yourself around the room for even having it. But Mom would have appreciated that kind of gallows theater humor. She was always up for the next show. I probably would have done it too, if not for the presence of my sister who didn't inherit my mother's cavalier attitude toward life and death and spirit, and was at that moment sobbing uncontrollably over the empty shell.
My mother was too poor to afford a pauper's grave. She left this life carrying just what she came with. The medical examiner's office confiscated the body and grudgingly turned it to ash. They won't give us the ashes unless we pay for them. She would have laughed. When asked if she would like to be buried or cremated, she often said, "Don't fuss over my remains....just have a party."
"These words don't make me a poet, these Eyes make me a poet."
The Poet's Eye
) A big abrazo to you and best wishes for you taking care of yourself, amigo!
