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Gasping
- Red Hen Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
30 Gasping There was no precedent in my life for your death. My mother was killed by an anaesthesiologist or a surgeon concealed behind swinging doors. I wasn’t there. My father died sitting upright in front of the TV. His sister died in whispers of the Big C when I was three. A mass family destruction surmised when the ashes of Auschwitz were sifted. But you lay dying for hours in full view of the children. Nieces and nephews came and went as if they were dipping into a novel. A skillful nurse with a sense of the ways a man’s body drifts away piled pillows around you, and the ancestors waited. You breathed your last breaths in a rasping ichorous rhythm I had only read about in literature, which I have fortunately forgotten for how could I effectively render it? ...