Please Talk about Me When I'm Gone

Interpolating a Poem

(2013)

Nervous and unnerved this evening, alone:

Searching for solace, something not unlike prayer,

A hope that the past will not repeat itself,

Progress: a preemptive strike, this procedure

(They call it a procedure when

They expect nothing unexpected).

Precedence and percentages: our family has a history,

Meaning that some part of someone who has died

Might be alive and unwelcome and somewhere inside.

Remembering: immeasurable moments, IVs and all

The unpleasant things you can't force yourself to forget.

Bad days, worse days, glimpses of serenity then grief,

A flash focus of forced perspective-this too shall pass.

Then, inevitably, earlier times: I recall

When doctors and dentists handled us with bare hands.

Still living, then, in a past the future had not

Crept up on, a time when the truth was believable,

Because the only lies that children can tell

Get told to escape tiny troubles they've created.

(Have you ever tried to see things from cancer's point of view? What would it look like if cancers were capable of writing the stories? Let's give it a shot: After a long, brave battle, the cancer that began in Linda Murphy's colon finally emerged victorious on August 26, 2002. Despite being assailed by chemotherapy, radiation, fear, hatred, and fervent prayers, the cancer-having been beaten back three times-remained resolute and overcame one final, furious barrage. This cancer, in killing its host, became only the latest in a long line of martyrs willing to die in order to survive. Like its host, Mrs. Murphy, it was brought into being with the end of its existence a foregone conclusion. That it struggled and persevered until the end is a credit to metastasizing cancers around the world.)

And so I am uneasy and it's not even myself

I am thinking about: frightened all over again

For my mother, and I can do nothing for her

Now, just as I could do nothing for her, then.

A cycle: she had seen her own mother suffer

While each of them made their anxious inquiries,

Appeals entreating the darkening clouds, out of time.

Like her son, she eventually became acquainted

With the white-walled world of procedures

And all that happens-before, during, after, and beyond:

Hope and fear, faith then despair-the nagging need

To believe in men and the magic of machines.

Or the things we say when no one is speaking.

(Fourth time's the charm, I didn't say, but I knew.)

(We all did. 1997, 2000, 2001, and now 2002. Each previous time we'd avoided the verdict, dodged the bullet, lived to fight another day, embraced whatever cliché we could beg, borrow or steal.)

(This time, we knew. The surgeons would slice her open and see it. It's in there; it's everywhere, they would say. And then they would stitch her back together and deliver the news, all grim business. And we would bow our heads and pray for God's blessing, as we'd been instructed in those weekly services that transport ritual and inculcate compliance. Tradition, that resilient escutcheon handed down through so many generations. Which is exactly the way it happened.)