Three Poems Mostly About My Mother and My Sister Emily

Radical Surgery

                Before her final

cancer came to light, my mother took my sister Emily to the

                clinic several times
to have ear wax removed. Not long before my friend
                Dave got sick,
his wife Gerri underwent a preventative mastectomy, with a
                cruelly slow recovery.
When Dave became faint for no apparent reason,
                playing racquetball with
me at the Y, I had the front desk call 911.
                The paramedics came,
but found no sign of the expected heart attack.
                Gerri arrived and
drove Dave to the VA. As I watched them leave, Dave shouted,
                ”John, if we
never see each other again, I want you to know,
                I love you.”
By the next day, an MRI had detected an
                inoperable brain tumor.
I did see Dave again several times, played
                golf with him,
and during the final vigil held his hand for
                half an hour.
As for my mother, about a year before she died, the surgeon
                removed a grapefruit-
sized tumor from her chest (she must have lived
                with the knowledge
of that tumor for years before she finally went in).
                During my visit,
she gave me the job of digging out masses of
                root-bound iris
from an eight-by-twenty-four-foot flower bed. I worked
                for hours with
a garden spade, chopping out the putrid, pulpy tubers,
                slicing them small,
and heaving them into the compost –
                clumps of curly
tendrils, some harboring tiny clutches of writhing
                snow-white maggots

Summer in Gunnison

1.

                Summer in Gunnison,

Colorado – was it before my first grade year? –
                about the time
I began to know there was something wrong with my sister Emily –
                the dream in
which I watched her shrink and shrink
                down and down,
until she was a pirate stamp on the inside of a glass fish bowl.
                Approached by way
of Monarch Pass above timberline – bald rock landscape –
                banks of snow,
and snow falling, coating the road my father navigated,
                white-knuckled in
the blue Nash Rambler – my mother
                impatient – we kids
sensing our parents’ least emotion with our fine antennae

2.

                I don’t recall
a thing about the campus dorm apartment we lived in

                or my room.
I’m sure Emily did her usual trick of screaming for hours at
                night – I imagined,
lying with her mouth up against the crack of her bedroom door, deliberately to
                make the noise
as nerve-wracking as possible – it seemed to me that she screamed
                with an impish,
perverse intent, but I’m sure I realized how incapable she was of

                meaning any harm.
She lay screaming, completely oblivious of me or anyone

3.

                Gunnison was damp,                                         
smelling of pine, leaf rot, and mosquito fog –
                acrid mists drifting
down from the mountains in the late afternoons,
                prompting some to
call their kids indoors.
                Wide, sandy ditches
ran down each street – I guess to
                channel snow melt
in the early summer. Beside these ditches grew
                the biggest dandelions
I’ve ever seen. By joining
                their stems together
and sucking to start the flow, we could dry
                a small puddle,

draining it into another lower down. – I

4.

                remember little else,
except the climbing rope in the gymnasium, and some kind of running
                game with balls,
which I was hesitant to join at first, but in which I soon found myself
                completely enjoyably absorbed,
and our futile fishing forays on the Gunnison River

5.

                At the end
of the summer, my Evans cousins came and
                spent a week.
I think we left Gunnison with them, driving
                to Colorado Springs,
where we all went swimming in a big lake.
                I fell desperately
in love with my cousin Terry, who was two or three years older –
                tall, with auburn
hair – I remember her beige swimming suit and her
                thin, uncanny feet.
I longed to put my arms around her and kiss her face, as
                we rode together
in the back of my uncle’s green station wagon, and she
                read with me
the Golden Books story of Scuppers
                the Sailor Dog

Mama’s Death

                In the weeks
surrounding Mama’s death, I made several trips to Denver. It’s hard
                to remember now
what happened on which trip. My time was mostly taken
                up with business:
getting a bank to collect on years of social security and stock dividend
                checks that Mama
had thrown on the laundry room floor; trying to grasp the pieces of her
                not-unsubstantial estate;
getting the cats removed from the house when I realized Mama was afraid

                she might suffocate
if one of them sat on her chest and she couldn’t
                push him off

                The biggest concern
was to get Emily settled in a group home situation of some kind.

                Because her mother
was dying, Emily’s case was treated as urgent, and she soon moved
                to an establishment
called the Jewish Group Home, near Mama’s house. The only possible
                objection was Emily’s
devout Baptist faith, but I assured the director that my mother was
                not a Christian,
and that for Emily to enter the group home was
                Mama’s greatest wish

                One morning, when
Mary Catherine was in town, we got a call from Robin back in
                Minnesota. The hospice
had phoned there to let us know that Mama was doing poorly.
                When we called
back, the nurse told us (a little sheepishly) that Mama had already died.
                I suppose we
drove to the hospice to pick up whatever Mama had brought
                with her there.
Mama herself had arranged for the cremation long before,
                and her body
was already gone. There was nothing to do and nowhere to go, so Mary
                Catherine and I
organized a small memorial service. We both bought clothes
                for the occasion,
and we bought an outfit for Emily. Pastor Fredrick of Emily’s
                Galilee Baptist Church
conducted the ceremony. He seemed slightly embarrassed, or

                troubled – possibly because,
by his way of thinking, my poor mother was
                probably in Hell

                At the end
of my last visit while she was still in the house, Mama asked me to
                arrange that she

be moved to the hospice before I left. During the last evening, I
                think we finally
spent some meaningful time together. We listened to a Beethoven
                quartet on the
record player – not one of the late ones – I think it was the Opus 95
                in F minor.
Mama listened attentively, with obvious enjoyment (I remember
                her saying once
that she believed she had a musical gift, even though she never chose or
                had the opportunity
to sing or play). The next day, when it was almost time for my flight home, I
                called the ambulance
for Mama’s trip to the hospice. It arrived in a flash, before we
                were really ready.
I told Mama that she had been a good mother. She told me that I had been
                a good son

                The day before
she died, the three of us – Mary Catherine, Emily, and I – came to the hospice
                to visit Mama.
We didn’t know that this would be the last time we would ever see her.
                She was annoyed
that we had all  come at once – it seemed somehow
                wasteful to her.
As we were leaving, Emily said, “I love you, Mama,”
                and Mama said,
“I love you, Emily,” and then
                she was gone