Reunions: Father, July 18, 1990 (Poem)

Reunions: Father

July 18, 1990

Scene 1: 2909 North Nottingham Street

The clock set at 4:15 p.m.
Before 4:30 I lost you
in a chiming of ever-closer sirens.

From you to phone to glass door I
watched for that blur of red
— rose-deep, a harder color than I want to remember —
screaming to come clear.

Help in a red and white wagon pushing
for last tries before unlasting breaths.

The pulse punishes the memory, the adrenaline
maxing out when you need it most.

The noise was a pain.
Everywhere for seven minutes before
then suddenly here where it had to be.

My hands to my ears,
automatic-like, did no one any good.

I didn't expect the rescue in front of me to go bad.

I didn't want to be in control

Of a 63-year-old woman panicking
and my not-yet two-year-old urging,
Grandpa get up! Grandpa get up!

This is the part
of the parts I never reacted to:

How a half-dozen volunteers arrived
in less than eight minutes

How they rolled up a corner
of the antique Persian carpet

How they pulled you
from the bathroom where you collapsed
to the place we call the living room

Where they used mouth-to-mouth
— so much better were they than I —
and shot you up to trick your heart into rising again

How they couldn't wait
to stash the detritus of their care

How I couldn't wipe away the sticky pool of cells
absorbing our newly refinished floor

How it was over
and then just began

A neighbor I had not let in
saying, Go. Don't give it any mind.
I'll take care of it. And the baby.

(Did I forget about the baby?)


Scene 2: 1701 North George Mason Drive

I, in front with the driver,
you, Dad, in back,
an EMT still doing his best
to keep your beat to the beat.

In Emergency, before I quit
telling them I couldn't sign any papers,
you, alone in some cubicle with a doctor
making decisions of his own, were already gone.

Kept busy answering for information
not one of us had, I cycled all the numbers
from Jacksonville, to Venice, and  Ft. Myers, Florida
to Indiana, Kentucky, and Bethpage, Tennessee

Startled into starting all over again
when a nurse hushed us to a private room.

The news was changed.

I couldn't have prepared for
the difference I saw
in you

Cleaned up, that sheet of antiseptic white
giving no hint of the way
your chest had been pounded.

Lifelines removed, your eyes stiller,
the curtains on their rolling rings
shutting in a private moment

A wife somewhere carrying on.

We were together
one last time before our last time.

How much time
was enough time
to be with you?

Cases waited. They needed the space.

Someone asked about organ donations.
Someone else said you were too old

To give up
anything but your corneas.

I asked what you'd want. Your license didn't say.

On the way out I took in hand
a brown paper bag, more fragile than the satchel
we lug groceries in. More plain than the kind for tidying
papers we bundle every Wednesday.

T-shirt. Socks (no match: you were color-blind).
Black shoes? (A guess.) Belt. Billfold.
Watch worn since retirement.

Left over
Left out
Left for.

What I have of you still
I hold in safe-keeping

Your watch keeping its own time.

© 2010 Maureen E. Doallas. All Rights Reserved.
_____________________________

This is my recollection of my father's unexpected death on July 18, 1990, at my home on Nottingham Street, where I lived at the time. Virginia was Dad's last stop after several weeks of traveling about with my mother to visit children and grandchildren. He and my mother, with my son in tow, had been out all day, seeing friends. Within 15 minutes of my arrival home from work that afternoon, Dad was dead. He was not yet 74. He was honored for his World War II service with modified military honors (meaning all honors but a horse-drawn caisson) and is buried on a hill in one of the oldest sections of Arlington National Cemetery off Pershing Drive, where the sun beats the ground hard on a summer's day and the grass refuses to grow much and from which the view of  Washington, D.C., is beautiful at any time of year. The sound of Taps and 21-gun salutes continue there still.

This is my contribution to L.L. Barkat's Random Acts of Poetry prompt: to write a poem about a certain street or street address. Mine on Nottingham Street is one I can't forget.

Links to poems by other RAP participants can be found in the comment box here.  Check there through March 18 for additions.