Obsequy

The mother of a friend was desperate for

new lungs

Yet when a likely donor delved finally

down into the grave

His parting gift lacked health enough to share.

His body fought

fought long, you see.

His lungs grew stressed from this tenacity.

As this numb friend tumbled her story out

I stuttered rudely back to a cramped

closet room in Tampa ICU:

tube-mute, jaundiced from sepsis, my Father

waging a final fight against the scythe.

His valiant heart still refusing to fail

as pumps coughed and monitors wailed.

The doctor laid it plumb with quiet truth

even as I wept,

the man I knew was done.

To walk and think and piss as ever past

that chance was gone, and if he might live on

it would be forever through machine tethers.

“If he survives, it will be a huge burden…

make no mistake.”

What son was I, to feel such dread and breath

a sharp, dark jagged hope that he found death?

His sepsis meant I could not touch his skin.

I grasped his shrunken hand through gloves,

convinced his slack eyes gated unshed tears.

He taught the boy I was a fullsome list

a catalog of verbs, of firsts,

a ladder for a man to scale.

He showed me truths, this last

the most substantial, meanest script I’d read.

But to other truth, as well, I’d been led -

the sweat of needful work, perceiving grace,

the knack of locking pain from your face…

Despite his state of mortal atrophy

he was stalwart in his Culloden-stand.

Tired pride glowed at this staunch refusal.

Shaded by grief, but distinct, was wonder:

In the shadowed whorls of dreaming

did he fight again on Chelsea streets,

on navy decks, on picket beats?

Did he face losing his wife again?

His rage at cancer flaring when

This final effort needed fuel?

Was it children that he swung to save?

His new granddaughter’s tiny wave

the catalyst that burned so hot

that he could never yield nor stop?

A warm and briny shower bathed his brow

as the signal from his chest pulsed slower.

And, later, a day exhausted…he died.

I recall my own shocked blank shambling,

feet scuffing scarred tiles,

gimbal-locked and hollow as

air-burst emotions self-consumed.

I could not vomit the poisoned ashes

sucking in my gut.

Heart decompressed to black frost-flecked vacuum,

I edged past while hospital work resumed.

I shuffled further, floors below,

In some poor Dante-analog, to where

a tired clerk, akin to death,

stamped firmly down in red upon a life.

And lazily slid through a window slot

The paper proof my father was now lost.

I found myself outside the auto-doors

Hard tropic night weighted my breath, my limbs

all floodlights and bugs and humidity

I burrowed through thick mental mist to wring

some logic, some abstract angle that linked

an illuminated pirate sloop

bobbing in the bay nearby

to the page grasped in my hand,

to the body of my father, left

somewhere lonely in the building behind.

but I could not. Exhausted, I had no tears left,

I could not take him with me, yet

driving away was beyond my ken.

Mocked by the cloud-shrouded moon, dumbstruck,

I slowly thought of what I couldn’t save

And lessons to be learned before the grave.

So when my troubled friend explored my eyes

And asked If I could understand her stress

I counseled not to die about insane “whys”

As I survived a similar duress.

While the needed cure had failed to advance

At least her Mom would get another chance.