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| 1975, photo by her father |
The fentanyl patch was stuck to her collarbone, just under the chickenpox scar that so mortified her at 14, and now pierced my heart. Unable to speak, she was still able to smile. "She doesn't know who you are," the neurosurgeon had said. "That's just who she is." But she wasn't smiling now as she stared at the wall, wide-eyed, transfixed. What she saw, I fear to know.
I hated our parting. I wanted to follow. Just as she'd shown me London and Paris and New York, so she could show me the invisible world. I wonder, sometimes, if she's still waiting to show me. How can I know? Maybe she wants me to stay. Sometimes it feels like she does.
So I start up the mower, plug up my ears, and 'round and 'round the farmhouse I go, circling her childhood. Her presence is strong in this field-tamed-into-yard where she ran through the grass clutching daisies under the old pear tree where the tire on a rope swings free. I shut down the mower to make a few notes. The trick is to stay ahead of your ghosts, and write it, write it, write it.
You can't sum it up. A life. Summer moves on. Fruit falls to the ground. People you love live and die. You can't sum it up. Love ends. But what if it doesn't?
—last stanza with lines from Ada Limón's The Hurting Kind
