Motherless Children Childrenless Mothers

My friend Peter's mom died. She died of some horrid, messy cancer, not one of the ways anyone would ever select if given their choice of ways to leave earth, but still: At least the horrid, messy ways have a rather unsettling way of making death somehow seem a little less sinister, sometimes almost like someone you don't mind having show up at your table. And Peter got the news in a rather spectacular fashion, standing atop the highest vantage point on an island in the Pacific Northwest with the treetops and ocean below and the clouds all around, and the signal on his cell phone finally just strong enough to retrieve the message that was waiting for him from his sister: "Mom's gone." If you have to retrieve this sort of message, this may be the ideal place to be.

So you snap shut the cell phone and slip it back into your pocket. Now is not the moment to return the call. That call will be made soon enough. The urgency is gone. There is no more time question, no more waiting for the call. The clouds are caressing your calves like a cat who wants stroking. You clear your throat and it sounds softened by the moisture in the air. What remains to be said. You clear it again, though you have not a single word to say. Your mom's gone. Everything that will be said has been said. The words float away like wispy clouds, like smoke from a distant campfire, down in the canopy of trees. What remains unsaid once I love yous are done, once I'm sorry has been whispered. The ocean stretches out and seems without end. What is a horizon but a line. What is a line but an imaginary construct. A line goes to infinity, by definition. How far does a life go? Definitions are such fabrications and so comforting. What is a cloud. What's a mother.

Peter's mom died and my own is dying, too, and she called me last night soon after I had the news from Peter. I didn't tell her. I just told her I loved her, told her I missed her. Didn't tell her I was sorry for anything. One has to save something for the future. Here's a poem for all those moms, dying, because cruelly enough I still have words.

Mom, Dying
Doesn't there come a
day when the sunrise
is not sufficient, when
the trailed whistle of
some faraway train holds
no whisper of places
unseen, a day when you
will loosen the grip
of your boney fingers on
my pulse and just slip
into the night I have
pooled at your feet
with my ink? Do you
love me enough to
leave me lonely?