The day Mom died

For years she suffered

And I prepared -or tried- for that fateful day.

I smeared on so much empathy

If mom were a toast

Even she would have gone soft.

I tried to reconnect sinews that had been torn

enmeshed neuralgic structures

tangled after years of family riffraff.

Trying to paste it all together was naive,

even in the name of the Family.

Trying to be "there" was idealistic,

when for so many years we were pushing apart.

It was a week when the rains heaved in

My worries of "nature drying" were dispelled when the

phone rang announcing mother lay dying

She had a week left at best, so I began to prepare my bags

and then

a point

in

my

chest

Burning pain, I knoweth not where from

A small but deep point, like a bite that drilled into my flesh

had me check into the emergency

I had to check

I a nurse, a health professional, and then be off! to my grave business.

Upon examination the doctor said,

"We have to operate tonight, no later, no later."

"But my mother is dying, I have to go"

"If we let you go, you will join your mother, but not on this living world"

My soul was jolted

had I trucked with evil spirits?

had I not gone to church enough?

had I not been honest? were some of the myriad of questions that jangled me.

That night the surgeon removed the foreign agent that had invaded my body

That night my mother died.

My friend accused a parallel psychosomatic disorder,

a stress inflection on the corpus callosum just above the temporal lobe that I had suffered from.

Regardless, heavy doses of antibiotics were prescribed

that ultimately buried my stomach in a WWI trench.

Still, with stoic resolve, I went to the funeral

Wanting to hold still, to listen still,

to the words and the music that my mother loved

Only if still

My intestines didn't rumble like a tank moving over the trenches where my stomach lie

awaiting to explode.

Only if the internal aftershock wasn't there

But it was.

Forced to leave under the watchful family eyes

I tried to change thought

Didn't my cat go for a walk

Didn't you spend three days,

Three nights looking and worrying about it just before my infection?

And that fly that got under my bed cover?

My mind was slipping. Was it the antibiotics or my infection coming back to get me?

The cold bathroom at the funeral home piped insipid organ music

I held on to a heating pipe in the stall

And wished I were

In my bath, thinking about mother.