The Horses' Heads Were toward Eternity

https://poets.org/poem/because-i-could-not-stop-death-479

I’m diving into fall with a vengeance. Ghost and witch movies and TV shows, roasts and veggies in the oven. Doing a lamb shoulder tonight. And prepping a past’alla norma for the week. It was 82 degrees outside today, and it’ll be 78 tomorrow. It’s only September 14th.

I know something’s up.

Mom died a month ago. I was on my way to see her the morning she died – my siblings and I had been by her bedside and I was going to see her one more time before I headed back home, but she was gone before I got there. The way the nurses put it to me was kind of like, “if you run, you can catch them as they’re taking her away,” but why would I want that? Why would I want to see her like that?

Since then, I haven’t really grieved. Her death was so long in coming – she had Alzheimer’s and I can’t even remember when she started to decline. Mom lived in the moment, always. That was one of her greatest gifts. Not quite, as Ted Lasso says, the memory of a goldfish – but the past was never important to her, and the future was…whatever it was going to be. She was placid, in a lot of ways – it was rare that she was irritated or upset.

My grieving happened around the time of her diagnosis. When I realized that all the things I’d set up for her – all the streaming channels, the subscriptions – were not things she could access on her own. All these sources of stimulation, education, furtherance, turned out to be things she was content without. Her world grew smaller and smaller and smaller, and she wasn’t particularly unhappy about it – at least not to me, aside from the occasional minor frustration.

Her funeral – well, both funerals – it was all at the end of August. Then it was Labor Day, and then I was swept back into this massively demanding job. While I was down in Delaware, it really was wild how nobody there could understand how all-encompassing work is these days – Mom’s cohort worked strictly 9-5, with an hour for lunch, and they retired early. My emotional distance from them was almost greater than the physical distance I’ve maintained. For a reason. I never fit in there. I never wanted to. I only ever wanted to leave. 

And I did.

Mom’s death turned a page on a season for me. The Alzheimer’s, the hospice bedside, the endless trips down the New Jersey Turnpike and over the Delaware Memorial Bridge – they’re firmly at my back. I will never make that trip again. Boxes of photos and documents and…I don’t even know what, are in a brand new storage space I just rented. And I’m back here, in New York, at my desk as though none of this ever happened.

So her death also turned a page on a big piece of my life. The past is firmly in the past – the door latch clicked, the lock turned. Except we all know that’s not how any of this works. That grief will erupt when I’m least prepared for it. I can think all I like that I have it under control – but, like the jokes about Russia, grief controls you. It’s only a matter of time.

Tomorrow, I go to the New York Philharmonic. Mom was a cellist. Dad loved Leonard Bernstein. My subscription is their legacy. I’ll come home and have a sandwich with a slice of cold lamb and horseradish and lettuce and tomato. And I’ll get up and go to my desk on Monday and wonder how anyone could not understand that work is all-consuming.

Death will stop for me, at some point. But I could not stop for it just now.