—for  Aimee Schultz Losse

   April 24, 1918 – February 27, 2002   

Purge me with hyssop, and . . .

 wash me, . . .

                                               Psalm 51:7

in the wee hours of Thanksgiving.  And I saw

medical workers insert a tube through her nose.

And that was before the feast that should have been—

no, was—but got delayed,

as they drilled us for reasons (in ER), for justification

for the many pills we brought along,

to keep her body in a fragile balance,

gone, unknowingly, with a broken sternum,

from the accident in Shelby.

We saw coffee-ground vomit,  knew only

some of the answers,

felt reprimanded by staff doctors,

for ignorance, for nocturnal confusion:  Still,

up for a day and a half,

I know what dehydration is

and tried to prevent its happening.  At home, I

washed soiled sheets, not for love

(nor lack of it) but to put things right. I

moved like a poet—laboring—

under the burden of truth.

And once,

when we came to visit and found her unclean

with a powerful stench wafting in the air,

she waved us away with bony fingers,

hiding her face in a cotton blanket.

The nurse would clean her.  We’d eat

hospital-chicken.  But by accident, we left our

money in the car, and discovering our oversight,

left food near the register, fled into cleansing rain,

much needed and ever-so-welcome,

like the promises preserved in the canon of God.

Promises?

Yes.  But hers is a much longer story.

And I deal here only with possibility:

How sometimes, the mind fails to know

what the body fails to do.  Sometimes it does know.

Sometimes the mind fails to know what it does,

and the soul fails to know what the mind is doing—

like the time she said, especially delicious meals,

always, to my knowledge, eaten

in the company of Paul, whom she misses—

and her mouth in sorrow now just forgets to eat.

So five—or was it six?—and three

at Monday’s Care Plan Meeting:

the Springwood staff and her next of kin,

addressing her waning effort, her long-held depression.

We hear out their plan—give it two weeks—

buy wine and a bird feeder,

notice the commode, newly placed in her room,

hang an analog clock, or try to.

And we, who live in her dwindling shadow, quarrel,

while she nudges the contents of her lunch with the tines of her fork.

She lies there day after day, her eyes either foggy

or shut.

But knowing that the past is never “just the past”—

knowing things she does not know—

what I want is a miracle.  I want to scream like Jesus,

no, to Jesus:  Take up thy bed, and walk!

and watch her walk.

Too tired?

Why we all are.

I had even asked my friends—

when we left the Ghoeles’ house following the Fifth Saturday Social—

Is it all right to pray for snow?

And they all said,  yes!

With the new year, the snow came.  So we

re-built four computers

—four acts of restoration

—that helped us with the claiming of our peace.

She asked us to go away, visit her later—

just as January settled in—

on that Saturday before it rained a cold and freezing rain,

the sky as dark and lonely as a prayer thrown back from heaven.

And then one night, she said, we’d kidnapped Aimee,

even prompting me to write it down.  So I’ll include known details:

When she choked on breakfast sausage,

she got oxygen.  The pneumonia had settled in,

clogging her lungs with invisible pus.  And the ligament,

exposed and visible, in the sore on her left leg was slow to heal.

Fact is:  It never did.

She used her energy to resist therapy, or so it seemed.

She felt caught in the middle, didn’t know what to do,

said, it seemed we all wanted different things.

And we did.  We’re different people.

Then we said our good-byes in a hospital room,

cried and held each other’s hands.  A kind nurse

drew the window shades.  She told us to take our time.