Vigil

For my dad

My dad died fifteen years ago this week. He was a complicated man. When he was dying, I called him my hero. He did save my life. When I was twenty-two and using and drinking myself to death, he was the one who told me I was an alcoholic and if I left the house to never come back again. I had certainly been called an alcoholic before but something about my dad saying it, not that nicely either, and the fact that I had nowhere to go, got my attention.

He was what I would call a functional alcoholic, and even after he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, the one thing he never forgot was cocktail hour. He eventually died of cancer in 2009, though in many ways, because of the Alzheimer’s, we lost him before that. In March, when he was diagnosed, I was able to fly to Dallas to be with him and my mom for about seven weeks. Those weeks were some of the sweetest of my life.

Each afternoon I would sat in the rocker beside his bed. Outside the clouds would gather gray and then part briefly to reveal blue sky. In a month, the trees had blossomed and begun to leaf, though the air still carried the chill of early March. “Winter,” a friend told me, “doesn’t want to let go this year.”

My father lay in the bed, the curve of each bone visible under his rice-paper-like skin. I saw the skeleton that held him. My mother and I said, “It’s okay to let go.” At that point, he ate just a few spoonfuls of strawberry ice cream each day. Setting the book whose pages I was turning aside, I would check for the rise and fall of his chest and then spend the next moments holding his hand before allowing my eyes to close.

The days were, times, interminable. One day merged into the other, one hour becoming the next’s mirror. There were minutes I thought I can’t keep sitting here, when death seemed too long and slow.

Yet when it came, at 1:30 in the morning, barely the beginning of a new day, April 25, 2009, it was too quick, too soon. The moment itself was so simple, just a breath and then my father’s chest was still. Listening, my ear next to his mouth, I heard the death gurgle in his throat and then nothing.

“I don’t think he’s breathing, Mom.” And my mother rushed to his other side, held his wrist as if to feel for a pulse, gripped his hand, kept murmuring, “I think he’s still breathing.”

The aides cleaned his body, and my mother and I left to call my brothers, one in another state, one in another country. When we returned to the room where he spent the last seven weeks of his life, his body lay flat, wearing a clean pajama top, a clean sheet covering his skeletal frame. His neck was wrapped to keep his head from drooping. I almost didn’t know him, know it, the body I saw then had merely contained my father for eighty-seven years.

I wrote this poem several months after my father died.

This is not a poem about

the light in October
or sitting in Susan’s garden 
or moss-covered stones
under the green
wrought-iron chair, the warmth
of the sun in this spot
tucked away from the wind.

Not about the wind carrying the 
            sounds of
bluegrass, or the jade stone in a circle 
of bricks, or the water tipping toward
the bird bath’s edge. This is not

a poem about my father’s death 
this past spring, how the azaleas 
bloomed pink as the sun rose
to meet summer, or about autumn
and the comfort of its now shorter 
             days, how
the sun’s slant softens grief’s edge. 

This is not a poem about 
the darkness I hold too close,
time and its passing,
how each moment hands itself
to the next.

---

This poem was originally published in Electica in 2017.

Thanks so much for reading. I appreciate all the likes and comments and just knowing you spent a moment or two reading poetry.