Poem: Free Spirit
— For my grandma, Carolyn Wyse (R.I.P)
My most meaningful memory of my grandma
was the way she mused upon the afterlife
on a road trip shared between the two of us.
Driving under the night sky,
she wondered whether consciousness could
defy decay
and whether we could still think
when we became stardust,
strewn into space again,
born into billions of new bodies.
We always had the best conversations.
When grandma was still full of life,
she spent thirty years of retirement
wandering the country in her RV, mostly solo,
never staying in the same spot
for more than a week or two at a time.
She lived
in the perpetual state of re-routing.
She was nearly omnipresent.
She would hoard and compile comprehensively.
Mostly brochures, books,
magazines, and news articles.
She would hand them off
to the people she loved most
because she knew the value of information.
She was the internet born in 1923.
She was virtually omniscient.
And everybody gravitated towards her.
Her energy could light up any space.
She made so many people realize their power.
In this way,
she was mighty close to omnipotence.
But she is human notwithstanding,
and today
she is ready to die.
At the nursing home,
there are long pull-string alarms
dangling from the walls
almost everywhere you can think of.
They hang there, dejected,
like flaccid, faulty ripcords
meant to prolong the descent
of elders into indignity.
When the family finds her room,
she is entrenched in her bed,
shaking like an autumn tree
before the scattering.
The nurses have her eating ice chips
as if the solution to old age
is to turn her whole body
into an organ cooler.
We can not enter her room
until we cover our sorrow
with stopgap hazmat suits —
Disguises that strip the humanity
from our last moments together.
She tells me I am handsome
even with a mask on.
I am not certain which one she is talking about.
I assume she means the the optimistic one
and not the blue N95 concealing my voice.
Our precautions make a mockery of her.
She was hoping we would be good hosts
and usher death through the door.
Because her next statement made me cringe.
With the candor of Kevorkian she said,
I wish there was a better way to do this.
As if sighing a solicitation of mercy killing.
I don't have the fortitude to appease her adieu.
I can only euthanize her
with pretty, premature poetry
she will never live to read.
So, instead,
we choose to deflect the statement.
And at this point,
my father tries to lighten the mood
as he plays with a stethoscope and says:
Either this thing is broken, or I don't have a heart.
But why he held it to his chest I do not know,
because everybody's heart is in their throat
choking back their tears,
trying to rally the right words
to make up for lost time.
There is no brochure for where she is going next.
The faculty here has bound her with red tape.
They have deemed her too fragile for freedom
and will not allow her the decency
of a deathbed sprawled in the sun.
She will end in morphine overdose
and the subsequent stripping of oxygen
from the coma.
But I have no doubt
that when she exhaled her final draft of air,
god pulled his green thumb
from the mouth of that Utah town
to hitchhike
upon the momentum of her life force.
It drove past the sunset
and scintillated a vigil of stars
like each was a neuron firing information
around the great beyond.
When the wild blue yonder glitters,
I like to believe
the divine is dubiously brainstorming
her replacement.
I still smile when I look up to her
because even when I can not see it,
I know the void never stops shimmering.