Aunt Lee's Last Year
If you had seen my big flat lemon-colored shoes, you would've hated them. "Are those shoes orthopedic?" you would've asked and twitched your head. You hobbled on your high heeled shoes right to death's stone shore and stood there, waiting. The dead man folded in a sheet and wheeled from the next room on his silver cart would have thrilled and offended you. You would have complained of the doctors who paused each day at your door to note no change and check their watches, complained of the nurses who turned your heavy body in your bed with perfect tenderness. For a year your coma wrapped your eyes and arms and ears and mouth in miles of taut gauze. It held you and held you. I shouted in your ear. With haggard acquiescence you let your medicines drip into you. You blinked. Sometimes your mouth jerked open, aghast. I looked at little pictures on the TV screen, Clinton and Madonna and the Mets, and walked the white hospital, bound by its routines. When I bent to kiss your parchment cheek, you seemed yourself, about to tell me you did all the work while the pretty sisters married one by one. But through blank snow and sun and snow again you never spoke. You fell away from me with no complaints.