Waiting

Waiting

Katrina and I held hands and made small talk
about and above the figure that didn't stir beneath the covers

and didn't look like my mother, with her glasses missing
and her face as white as cream but not so smooth,

indents still on her nose where she'd worn glasses
over sixty years. Then Katrina says it,

words I didn't not want uttered.  I wonder why she
has the right to break the unspoken family agreement

of denial. She, who is not really family, but the wife
of my nephew, who will years later divorce him

and not ever be a part of us again. Somehow though
she has a window to this privatest of moments

and it is she who says, "She is going to die soon anyway
we need to let her go." Grief steals away my voice,

like the second story man of any dime store novel
who sneaks in and takes the unsaved by surprise

leaving them there alone for eternity. I can only nod
and then silently, in some kind of unrehearsed ballet,

we both stand and whisper in my mother's ears.
Who probably never heard us anyway

her ears stopped up with the drip drip drip of morphine
but that I still like to believe she did.

And we tell her we know she is in pain
and it's time, and it's okay to leave us

when I really want to scream don't leave me
I still need my mother. I pray that the sinner's

prayer she prayed really means something,
and if I ever find my way back to God

maybe we can be reunited in some sort of heaven
I can't imagine, when the world is one long

tragedy. And at that moment I decide that I will play
Amazing Grace and Little Church of the WildWood

at her funeral. None of the magic moments I wait for appear,
those magic times you read about in Reader's Digest Magazine

when the dying person suddenly regains consciousnesses and everyone
says Hallmark goodbyes and has no regrets. Even as I regret I have told her to go,

I know my telling has little to do with life. That trying to change
the truth of her death is like trying to stop the changing of a season,

and I let go of her hand and the hand of almost niece and walk
into the corridor and wonder, "Is Heaven the same white?"