My drawing of my mother, Marian Wagner Spiro, suffering from the effects of dementia,  wearing the iPod and headphones I gave her. (from a photo taken by my sister, Martha, in the last weeks of mom’s life…)

There is so much to say, and so little that I find myself capable of saying at this time. The loss of one’s mother, no matter how fraught the relationship, is always incalculable, quite literally unable to be calculated. Because of the divorce from much of my family, included the extended network of cousins and so forth, imposed by my father for nearly forty years, I lost many years and many memories I might have made with my mother, and needless to say with the rest of my native family. However, because of this, along the way I learned the value of friendship, not just the emotional support and love from some one significant other, since I had none, but the kind of friendship about which it has been written:  Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. I learned what true friends are, and that they can love a person and care about a person perhaps with deeper love and kinder regard even than one’s family of origin.

 

This is not to say that I do not love and care about my family, of course, but it is my friends to whom I dedicated my newest book of poems and art, my friends both old and new. And they know who they are, I am sure they do. Because I feel it and I know it.

 

But that much said, I loved my mother, and what is more, I know she loved me and would have wanted me to have these loving friends in my life,  especially once she understood that having a nuclear family of my own was not in the picture for me.  I do not believe that she cared about whether I ever became a doctor or even a successful poet or artist, but only that I found contentment and love in my life, somewhere, somehow, and that she would be proud of me now, not for my achievements but for all these wonderful friends whom I love and who I know love me in return ( and in return for nothing except being me).

 

I love you, Mom, and I wish you well on your journey, wherever that takes you…Be at peace and know that all is well.

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I wrote this poem, or started it the night of my last visit to my mother, after weeks of not being able to put pen or pencil to paper. My younger sister, Martha and I had been splitting up the time and watch at the Hospice, though Martha had done the lion’s share of everything, living as it were just around the corner, while I needed a driver to get me first to Agawam and then to from Vermont to Amherst each day. In any event, just as I was finishing it, Martha called me with tears in her voice telling me that mom had passed away more suddenly than expected, no time to call me to come down to the hospice to be with her at the end.

 

HIATUS – June 18, 2017

“Just letting you know I am taking a hiatus because my mother is in the process of passing away and I need to give that my full focus.”

 

In the snapshot I take, you are almost not there,

barely stitched to your body by broken breathing,

those strands of beads upon which none of us pray

to keep you here, still here, still here…

the seeming years of days and nights

of your going having frayed the long wick of your life

till it seems impossible your heart pulses and breath

still clings to the flesh that clings to your bones.

 

 

In the stillness like stopped breath,

as the clock duties our days, from your morphine remove,

you can’t know how we mark a terrible time

while we wait for what is to come,

the inexorable exit-gong sounding: It is done.

 

 

All the same, they say life starts over, Mother,

if there is ever any life on earth without you,

as if we believed this day would come, or any other,

as if anything without you can ever be the same.