Her cancer returned by Thanksgiving, worse than before, and her family began the process of saying goodbye. A week before she died she left the hospital for the arms of her prairie home – its wild blueberry bushes, endless sky, her sacred dogs, and memory of horses. She was made comfortable, no pain I am told, in the house she raised two boys with her husband of forty years, her deathbed the old bedroom of her firstborn, who pines for levity wherever it may be found. Why not his brother’s room? he asks, with its two corner windows framing golden fields and robin’s egg blue, but like most things the answer is not known nor explored, though I consider the room’s closeness to the front door, for when the time came for her to leave, only the dogs would see her go.
She sat quietly with her lunch, overlooking the Chippewa River through the dining room bay windows as sunlight pierced through the clouds for the first time that day.
From the screened porch I spoke to my aunt and uncle and cousin as grandma watched the bend in the river knee, its banks plump with snow.
I still don’t know if she recognized me standing there, or simply waited for the right moment to speak, but after some time she looked up and smiled and said “It’s good to see you, dear” before returning to the river.
Kodama
I wander the dark house after everyone has gone to bed, looking for any sign of my grandfather’s ghost. Under the streetlamp the streets shine from fresh rain like sweat on a damp forehead. As a child the signs of life were the police scanner in the living room, sometimes accompanied by his silhouette in his recliner, listening in the dark, and later, as an adult, his constant coughs and groans, signs of life from the room below, my grandmother beside him, awake, holding his hand.
But he did not die here. He left in the middle of the night, unable to breathe on his own, seven miles south in a nursing home where he spent the final months of his long life. Maybe his ghost is still out there, wandering, turned around in a cornfield or pulled by the scent of his past life to the creek he crossed as a teenager, the fields of high grass covered in dew, his pant legs soaked to the knees on his nightly walk in the dark to see June, his love, years before they married.
The signs are everywhere, they just are not here.
The white figure out the living room window is not my grandfather and I don’t ask his name. He belongs to someone else, and I wave him on. He heads through the trees to the river where a spirit can travel twice as fast. The ballfield near the river where I chased grounders and pop flies has gone through so many changes, I struggle to recognize my own memories
The light that warms my face is death.
Maybe grandfather’s ghost is ashamed now the family knows of his numerous infidelities, like the woman at the bar he saw often, a ten minute walk from home. Where do you go if you can’t go home? The river lets out at the Great Lake and there it is separated from the sky by a line only the dead are willing to touch.
Mt. Pleasant
We identified the callery pear tree and paradise apple, both white as cherry blossom. Grandma said this was the first time she had sat in the garden, though she had the best view from her bedroom window. She gave her blessing to my sister and her boyfriend and their plans to move to Hawaii and I admit disappointment in myself for not being able to offer her the same.
As we left she gave me a hug and said “If I’m not here next time you visit, you know where I’ll be,” just as she had the last five years, but this time I think she means it. The sun broke through the clouds on the ride home yet the light continues to dim.
Evening Panoply 