Memento Mori

All my life I’ve been writing of it but not from it, directing a bare light bulb at its profile so I may outline its silhouette

on tracing paper. Its gifts have been delivered to my door in an unattributable basket, food nameless but nourishing,

cook anonymous, recipe untranscribed. I saw my father carried from the couch into the waiting ambulance,

which wailed like my mother could not, like I did not, as wailing is an art, its permissions learned. The rotating red

emergency light swept across his face like a rash, a red tide. I was not there when he died. I was at school, learning

equations, trying not to pee my pants because peeing them meant getting my wet bottom slapped by teacher

and carrying the soaked underpants home in a paper bag. Even if I’d been there, if I’d shut down his eyes

with my fingers dirty from recess, I’d know nothing more of it than I do now. He was so young, and death froze him

in time. If I knew him now I’d be his elder. I could tell him to pick up after himself. To shut the door against the heat

or cold. His illness made me conscious of the veins beneath the skin, the blue of a bruise and its gold aura, the bones that rise up

through the skin when one has been sick for a long time, unable to wear a suit and tie anymore, wrapped only in a blue robe

belted at the waist, and a back brace. He’d take short walks up and down the sidewalk in front of our house, pacing,

my mother called it, a word I contemplated, as I did the word “throb,” until they became part of my consciousness, just as I imagine

he contemplated the thing inside him, the thing he was inside, or soon to be, like a man walking the gangplank contemplates

the sublime blackness of the sea. Once, I ran from the school bus and leaped into his arms as he paced, like a girl in a movie. Knocked

his chin with my skull, made him bite his tongue. He stuck it out to show me the blood my performance had cost him. Blood type

O negative, which later I’d seek in other men, his disease, histiocytosis X, which together made tic tac toe. We played it

sometimes in the hospital room, but our hearts weren’t in it. Is anyone’s heart in tic tac toe? It’s a game built for hospital rooms.

His abdomen was interestingly swollen. His hands strangely cold. My face oddly ugly as I cried looking into a hand mirror.

My consciousness growing adverbs, distended with them. Anyway, the transformation was incremental; he’d been sick

my whole life, six years, then seven, so what I knew of Father was a body in constant progression, though toward what end

I could not imagine. The closest I can come to empathy for that destination is when I was put under for surgery. Ten, nine, eight,

gone. No comfort, no embrace, only absent, an empty desk at school, an empty coat hook, a locker resonant with its own hollowness.

On the day he died I walked alone up Fulkerson Road to my Brownie meeting, pressed my forehead to the screen door before

opening it and heard the girls inside praying for me. Absent but present. Present to my absence. Is this death? For a while I thought

it belonged only to my father and family pets. It was months before I understood my mother too would someday die, any time she left

the house she could die, like when she went on a three-day bender with her brother and was spotted all over town, flipping burgers

at the Four Square, laughing or crying and dancing at the cemetery, and I lay awake at my grandmother’s house, in the bat-filled dark,

waiting for word of my mother’s demise, drunk and hit by a train at the unmarked railroad crossing by the underground house.

Even at home...