The Art of the End

She’s teaching me to be old:

With every Thank you uttered

To every nurse who draws her blood;

With every reassurance

That everything is good;

With every stifled groan

She can’t remember to repress;

With every single visitor

Who comes with old regrets.

She’s teaching me how the body

Swallows up itself:

How the mind can lose the past

But not civility;

How the shriveled skin

Can still hold tight;

How the smallness of a frame

Can recede and shrink and fade.

She’s teaching me the art of the end,

Of slipping away,

A lesson I’ll only remember

As long as there’s no need.

But I’m studying hard,

Trying to learn the softness of the language,

So maybe something here will help me there someday

When my own body begins to turn away,

When she is gone and someone uninitiated

Tries to set me right—

And I’m retelling stories of this night,

And they know it might have happened,

The way I know she might have loved

Playing basketball when she was twenty-three

(At five foot nothing)—

The only thing she can recall from the eighty years she’s known.

We must not get to pick our memories,

So I know this useful one will go,

And I’ll likely only know the day I sledded in the snow,

Forgetting who was there and where I was but not that I was thirty-three

Or the wind-chapped sting of glee

As gravity pulled me

So hard away from home.