A poem about watching my father succumb to cancer. It is raw and true and everything I kept feeling as I watched him get sicker and sicker.
A tiny part
No one ever seems to mention the way it feels when a parent is dying.
As if the very roots that hold you to your identity,
Those very roots that have always been your constant
Grow sinewy and stretch more than you could ever imagine them stretching
Snapping apart from the world you used to know one-by-one like taut guitar strings
Struggling to clutch, but failing
No one ever seems to mention
The horror of watching a human being waste away
The bones that begin to protrude through yellowing skin
The absolute blankness of the eyes that focus on you
The spots and bruises and messes
The dignity that flails and relents
The power that runs out and sluggishly
Just gives up
No one ever seems to mention
How family, in times of panic,
metamorphose into people you don’t know
Their grief, so real and so grotesque,
Becomes them—transforms them into strangers
You can no longer turn to them because
They, yes, even they, are unable to fathom
Your pain on top of their pain, like a cup running over
The new distance is desperate, shattering, unfathomable,
And you can never run fast enough
to close it in.
No one ever seems to mention
The impenetrable hopelessness of disease
With its gripping black claws
and strangulating poisonous vines
That wheedle the mind as well, insidiously
All encompassing
All encompassing
Descending into a darkness—
an in-between layer of reality
You never can know: is he here? Is he here?
When will death show himself?
Sometimes, he makes you beg.
Perhaps it is all too
horrible to mention
And that’s why
no one ever does
Because when
death comes
for one
He also
steals
a tiny
part of
you.
And of
everyone
else,
too.
N
o
o
n
e
.
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