With the passing of my grandpa on March 5, I realized I had lost three out of my four grandparents. Reflecting on his life led me to also reflect on the lives and deaths of my other grandfather and grandma that I have lost.
The one who left first.
Slowly evaporating, breathless among tubes
antiseptic machines
as her husband told and retold
their first meeting in Texas
when he was a charismatic flyboy
and I paced hospital corridors,
wondering how Christmas
would now work.
Her death
baptized me into new acquaintance
with grief.
The one we lost unexpectantly.
Three missed calls to inform me a
cardiac arrest was,
all that was needed to disrupt
a family dependent on a
rounded-belly, good-humored
firework-buying, patriarch.
After the second death,
I practiced emotional eating
on the kitchen floor
trying to forget the last unrealistic look of him,
a painted body in a casket.
The one missing years before death.
Reverting to the bygone years
of his former life,
the present day
and our faces, now just
wisps across the synapses.
I entered the third death
guilty for the lack of time
I had given,
desperately trying to
remember the details of when he last
remembered me.
The one who remains.
An infinitely complex and compelling
woman, walking a finite tightrope
between desperate longing to join
her parted beloved and
the rest of us, here, watching her,
wanting her here,
anxiously trying to buyoff
death’s distillation.