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31 Death in the Family North Catholic Cemetery We die with January whistling its bleak songs through our ribs in the early-morning gray of 1969. We die in the whiteout of hospital rooms, in the slow burn of July’s kiln, chemo singeing our cells. We die with blood beading like sweat on the purpling balloons of our legs, our salt-choked kidneys wrecked. We die at sea, hours before our twenty-first birthdays, 1944, and our flag-wrapped bodies sink into the smooth Pacific. We die of second and third heart attacks, our zipper-stitched chests pried open, the ruined pulp of our hearts lit from above. We die the moment we are named, our faces blue-skinned, our unknit fontanels like deep, soft bruises in our skulls. We die raving.We die tied down and shitting our beds black, screaming into the faces of children we don’t recognize. We die with boxes of pictures and cards crumbling beneath our beds as merciful nurses glide syringes of morphine into our drips. We die with our dogs and our children howling over us, with miles of slow cars snaked behind the hearse. We die, and we greet us as we pass over the threshold with the stone-cut litany of day, month, year, and beloved of. ...

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