kindness & sympathy

there has just been an outpouring of kindness and sympathy
from family, from friends, from strangers.

thank you.

any kindness i can show

I expect to pass through life but once. If therefore, there be any kindness I can show, or any good thing I can do to any fellow being, let me do it now, and not defer or neglect it, as I shall not pass this way again.
William Penn

my grandmother has died.

Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion
Dylan Thomas

i feel she has been ripped from my breast.
snatched so quickly.

yet i know she was suffering.
i know this is a blessing.

but i am only human
and i can't understand that.

i can't believe
that she belongs
where i am not.

does god really expect for me to get that?

it will be one week tomorrow.

a week ago tonight was the last time i saw her breathing.
she was sleeping so heavily, not to be roused, but breathing.

i left work and raced to the house.
the undertaker was in the kitchen,

in her bed, she appeared to be sleeping.
i didn't want them to take her.
i didn't believe she was dead.
i didn't believe it.

i watched them wheel her
in a bag
down the deck.

it is that image that
haunts me now.

the bag was only zipped to her neck.
it was brown.

all the flowers have wilted

all the flowers have wilted
and i don't know when the sun will come again.

my grandmother is dying.

she went to the hospital in the middle of the week.
she was there for three days.
there's nothing that can be done.
she came home on friday.

all we can do is make her comfortable.

she needs care almost around the clock.

i spent the weekend at my mother's trying to help.
feeling so horribly inadequate.

when i first saw her she looked like a corpse.
a morphine induced sleep.
her body so still. so pale. i didn't think she was breathing.

cancer has just shrunk her.
she is barely clinging to 100lbs.
her lips, her eyes, everything seems so small.