Cycles

I wrote your eulogy before you died

Because you were ripping out the IV’s from the thin skin on your stomach,

Refusing the soup I brought you.
We sat and we spoke, and through broken teeth and shaky words we circled the drain in conversation.

All I could think about was the broth of the chicken noodle soup cooking, the oil floating to the top, the noodles fattening and sinking, the chicken tearing slowly, softening in the salt.
 The green peas breaking and the carrots hardening.

It wasn’t much money, it wasn’t out of my way, but it angered me.

You are so small and frail, a skeleton wrapped in flesh, as though your skin was zipped around you.

Your bones poking through the pale of your wrist.

Your spin curved, unnatural, every joint visible, connected like a toy train circling the track, but it is stuck, heavy, no one has oiled it.

Every blue vein running like a river, mouth agape, fattening into puddles and pools.
Red marks on your face and your feet and your arms.

Seeing every mechanical making of the human body at work, I would swear the blood pulsing through your veins is visible when I take your thin hand in mine.

Nails long and breaking, like the witches in my story books, your hair white and split, large patches of your scalp slick and oiled.

No fat to soften.

Hard and jagged and breaking.

And that soup is getting colder, the room is getting hotter, the window I crack is covered in webs and dead bugs
Their great escape ending between yellowing glass and a meshed screen.

Fruit flies that circle the room, dizzy, desperate.

The brown peel that drapes over the half eaten banana.
The nurse says it has been left for days, but you insist you are still picking at it.

The smell so fragrant, like a sweet death, a slow decay.

Trying to swat and catch the flies, looking between fingers for broken wings.

Small cruelties are necessary

to bring about life through rotten fruits and then catch it in your hands.

There is a creator and there is a destroyer, and perhaps they are the same person.

Perhaps they are 84 in a hospital bed, with a thin pillow behind their back.

Perhaps they are melted into the candles you lit as a child

In Northern Ireland.

Perhaps they are north or east or south,

West of your worries,

Or 6 feet deep.

Maybe it’s me.

Or your Mother that died in her 90’s.

Maybe it’s you with your starvation and raised skin where a needle sits, pumping into you, asking you to stay alive.

Maybe it’s the hand that feeds or the hand that took your cake away when your cheeks were too round and your thighs began to rub.

Or it’s the worker who heated the broth

And the frozen peas and ladled it into a cup

That I thanked and I paid and I drove to you with a fear of recognizing death before it has come to claim.

Or a fear of recognizing my own mortality in your small room, sitting in your wheelchair because the stool is covered in old blankets and unused diapers.

Coming from my sisters house, holding her four month old baby, with her soft skin and her fresh smell, the hair that grows thick and patchy, laughing when she fills her diaper, changing her as she kicks, indulging in the moments because they won’t last forever.

But they will be repeated.

They will be lived again.

In loneliness, a stranger taking you to the bathroom, wiping you, feeding you, helping you sit and stand.
Totally incapable, vulnerable, needy.

But there is no one to kiss your feet and brush your hair.

No one to tuck you under embroidered blankets and press their lips to your forehead.

Just the static of a tv and the old air conditioning unit.
The buzz of a fly and the smell of rotten fruit.

I left the soup.

You said you’d have a nurse heat it.

I knew that was a lie.

But I thanked you anyways.

Then I put the blanket over your thin body,

And I rubbed your foot.

I kissed your forehead and I smelled your head.

And I saw you as a child.

And I loved you like my own.

And I said my goodbyes through a thick lump in my throat,

Catching on my sadness.

I let the tears fall over my eyes and on to your skin.

And I left you there like a baby in its bassinet.
A soft cry as I walked out the door.
But I couldn’t look back.

Self soothing.

Self loathing.

Cyclical, cruel but comforting.

Futures and pasts and presents all melt into one.

And I feel them crash into me when the car door closes to my left.

And I wail.

Like a baby that needs to be heard.

Like a dying woman that needs to be held.

She won’t allow the untouched soup to be taken away.
It was the thought that brought her comfort.

It was the knowing that someone cared that let her rest that night.

And I slept well too,
For the first time since I’d been home.
Like a baby.
Like a dying woman.