Write the van. How when a friend eventually realized or admitted or accepted that the cancer would kill her, she bought a van. How the living room filled with faux wood panels, neutral-toned paint, open road atlas tracing routes to the seaside, to the house in Maine. How the work advanced slowly then urgently, winter then spring, and no one dared point to the clock or the cells because process counts more than outcome, some people say, every time that time runs out before outcome completes. There’s the plan then the tear of the paper with the plan. Write tearing. Write terror. The way it strikes when I remember, riding my bike or waiting in line. We used to eat takeout from The Cheesecake Factory. How a body can vanish into nothingness. Write the nothingness after somethingness. I mean loss, how ambiguous. Because a body can disappear into nothing or a body can disappear into South Carolina. Like one spring day, first blossoms and brisk, my mother annihilates an aching life. Phone screen blinks. I’ll be gone before you know it. Bird flying south, bird fleeing flock. Write the bird, right here, outside the front door. A neighbor barking, Put it in a trash bag, so I wrap the wings in cloth, carry to the park seeking soft earth and peace. Food wrappers litter the banks of the lake. Bulldozers line the meadow. How months earlier, before ancient oaks fall, before foxes and squirrels lie lifeless in dirt, my friend names this site on her list of final wishes. A meadow memorial in autumn leaves. Right season, wrong weather. Write storm. A hurricane in the Carolinas births a steady stream up north. By the window alone, sheets of rain blurring the pane for days and days and days. Write relentless unfolding. How during the final hospice week her health insurance is unexpectedly canceled due to a late payment. How her brother discovers his car with the catalytic converter stolen, a tire flat. How I take a walk, a break from the wail and the weep, into fireworks and city streets, a narrow escape from a gun to the head, cat vomit in the bed, hair piles on the stairs. Write memory. As something other than a line reaching backward in time. The fading, the fighting, the lighting of candles. We place two by the bedside. They flicker, she stiffens. At night a dream of the room ablaze in orange, red, her head in a crown. A holy scene. When morning comes I open a book, The Undying, page 254. The exhausted are the saints of the wasted life, if a saint is a person who is better than others at suffering. Write surrender. No. Write statues. How the Christmas after her husband’s unplugging from infinite tubes, beeping machines, my mother froze mid-scream. Actually froze, wineglass in hand. The hand of the arm of the body in grief. Write grief. Write body. How words work then don’t. How blood flows then doesn’t.
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