MINUTES
Done with
work, my friend calls
crossing
the bridge into Queens.
He’s on
his way to see Jimmy
in
hospice. Jimmy told him
to stay
home, he didn’t want
to be
remembered lying in bed,
drifting
in, out of pain and sleep,
too weak
to speak. But Mike’s
not sure
he meant it, what’s
the best,
right, thing to do.
Jimmy, a
neighborhood guy,
tall,
gawky, with white, blonde
floppy
hair, always smiling
or in his
garage, under his car.
Grease
down his forearms,
he could
fling a football a mile.
That’s all
I remember. Mike
brings up
his own father’s death,
waiting
for the morticians, asking
his
sisters to leave, take their tears
with them
while the body was lifted
out of the
bed, slid and strapped
onto the
gurney. He would’ve liked
to have
seen him stuffed in the box,
made sure
he was locked up good.
When me
and my brother arrived
at mom’s
hospice Monday morning,
they had
us wait in the lobby. We looked
at each
other, knew she was dead.
I thought
about how bad I should feel,
her dying
alone, not in her own home,
the amount
of relief I was allowed to show,
how often,
how deeply, the thought
would
haunt me through the years. Jaime
caressed
her face, cried, whispered to her.
I stayed
by her feet, my face getting wet.
The nine
months I helped take care of her
serving as
my minute by minute goodbye.
(Published
in Panoply)
Tony Gloeggler is a life-long resident of NYC who managed group homes for the mentally challenged for over 40 years.
His most recent collection, What Kind Of Man with NYQ Books, was a finalist for the 2021 Paterson Poetry Prize and
Here on Earth is forthcoming with NYQ Books.
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