Dear Grandma,

I sit here reading an email from my mother—

Grandfather has fallen again.

We ate dinner four days ago after a two-hour sunlit clear-sky drive.

You spoke of having needles stuck into your eyes.

Weeks ago we sat around a kitchen table and spoke of aging.

At the conception of this poem these bones have been around the sun twenty-three times.

No one ever laughs about the humor found in the inevitability of death.

You tell us you are scared of losing your vision.

And you don’t want to think about it.

Strange, how that is the ultimate human resolution—

the absence of anxious thought.

The timeless advice of ‘write what you know’ is a doorless room with a sunroof.

*

Two weeks and two days ago I sat in your dining room

slowly working through a generous portion of ‘Grandma’s Famous Crab Bisque’

talking about tides while we watched them recede out the far window

water gently lapping the bank of a far-off trailer park.

Two days later I heard that an ambulance came and took you away.

Two elderly gentlepeople in their mid to late eighties have given their lives to God

and in return He has blessed their children with the opportunity to watch them die.

I drank a tall steaming cup of coffee

before promptly falling asleep

on my father’s worn green couch

in his bare apartment

where he lives alone.

I drove quickly to my mother’s green and white house

near the edge of the forest next to Sligo Creek to hug and hold her.

They tell me the same thing:

this is the beginning of something

and the end of it all, simultaneously, forever—

the eternal cycle of endings and beginnings

is as far as we know the only constant

that has ever existed.

I wish my arms were strong enough

to hug and hold on to it all.

Love,

Sam