My Dad's Quarrel with Dying

I have taken to reading poetry everyday. The hope is that I will rekindle my capacity to invent metaphors. It’s a needed skill for fiction writing, one of my goals this year. And so I chose Wild Metaphors by Edward Hirsch, a book bought in an earlier decade. So far, each poem is about night, and death, too too dark for me right now, as the anniversary of my father’s death looms. But maybe it’s a good thing to read these poems, since the images go straight to my grief, and him. This morning I had a silent weep in the early hours of the morning, as the sun rose, shrugging off its persimmmon coat, then a tangerine one, and now, in its full naked glory, is standing on the horizon saying, ‘Move! Be!’ I cried because of these lines from “Poor Angels:” While the body sits glumly by the window Listening to the clear summons of the dead Transparent as glass, clairvoyant as crystal… Some night it is almost ready to join them. Oh, this is a strained, unlikely tethering, A furious grafting of the quick and the slow: When the soul flies up, the body sinks down And all night-locked in the same cramped room- They go on quarreling, stubborningly threatening To leave each other. I cried because my father, so quick on his mind and so graceful in his body, became trapped by the crippling diseases of the very old, and suffered so. He never gave up the quarrel between life and death, and clung to life, gently scolding us for asking him to sign a living will, a week before he eventually died: “Well, if there’s a chance I’ll make it, I don’t want them to not help me.” We were crowded around him in a wheelchair in his new room at the rehab facility, with the Hospice five-point document on a bedside tray in front of him, trying desperately to give him back the control he desperately wanted. We wanted to save him from being readmitted to the hospital, hoping he could die elsewhere. Who among us would tell him that his life was just about to end?