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Posts Tagged ‘gentleness’

Another Night in the ICU

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on October 16, 2023| 22 Comments »


for Ally
 
 
So tenderly, the night nurse lifts
the blankets from my mother’s limbs
and notes the drainage—
its serosanguinous color, its volume.
She checks mom’s vitals and does
whatever she does with all those plastic tubes
that now tether my mother to her life.
How quietly she moves, like a wraith,
she whispers, as if she’s a wisp,
something insubstantial, a midnight trace.
Yet the gift of her work is great
in this moment when all depends on care.
I marvel at her gentleness, her humanness,
her kindness as she works
and my mother’s chest rises and falls,
rises and falls in hard-won sleep.
Like a killdeer, able to make a nest
in bare soil, gravel, even a paved parking lot,
the night nurse makes of this sterile room
a soft-enough place, a place where my mother
can be safe. Like a mother killdeer,
the night nurse stays close to the room,
her eyes and ears trained for danger.
She’s tracking everything,
determined that all will be well tonight.
 

*

Dear friends, 
wow, thank you for the generous outpouring of love, prayers and well wishes for my mother and for me. I read every single one and thanked everyone out loud by name, and I am sad I won’t be able to respond individually to you, but please know how your kind words and good thoughts are carrying me and Mom. I have a deep abiding peace, despite the new curveballs the day brought. She had another (third) surgery today, and I hope and pray this will be the last and she can now rest and recover. She’s been in the hospital since Oct. 6. She’s had an intestinal surgery, a cardiac event, sepsis, a vascular surgery for lack of blood flow in her arm, an ulcer in her duodenum, dangerously low blood pressure, and today a third surgery to repair perforations that occurred at the point of the original surgery. Amidst all this she is a marvel of positivity, resilience, and kindness. 

And as I said last night, thank you to all who care for those who need healing. I am so so so so grateful. 

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Down the Rabbit Hole

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on January 23, 2023| 12 Comments »




It’s the Year of the Rabbit,
and I can’t help but think
of the photo of my son
the week before he died
holding a white rabbit in Ecuador—
a rabbit he bought and loved for an hour.
“Mom,” he said through the phone,
“can I bring home a rabbit? Please?”
I told him it wouldn’t make it through customs,
but he could buy one here at home.   
It’s the Year of the Rabbit,
and it feels right the crawl spaces
beneath our porches now shelter
the sweetest brown bunnies.
Where did they come from?
Every day now, my husband feeds them
pellets and lettuce. Every day
I watch for their tracks in the snow,
thrill when I see the sweet lumps
of their bodies as they venture into the day.
It’s the year of the Rabbit,
a time, they say, for calm
and patient energy.
I don’t know if I believe in the zodiac,
but I believe in gentleness.
I believe in thinking things through.
I believe in peace.
It’s the Year of the Rabbit,
and I am in love with rabbits—
with their large ears and feet
and their quivering noses
and the way they have hopped their way
into my life bringing softness
where there has been pain,
bringing calm where there has been trauma.
I will go down that rabbit hole.
I will make in that burrow a home.  

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Offering Gentleness

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on September 7, 2022| 6 Comments »

Gentle is time to be gentle.
            —Ole Dalby, private correspondence


Gentle is time to be gentle,
   he writes, and I let myself
     fall into the cadence of his words

the way as a girl I once dreamt
   I could fall into a cloud—
     something soft beyond soft,

something infinitely calm.
   Gentle is time to be gentle,
     he writes, and though

my mind struggles to decipher it,
   my body instantly nestles
     into the tenderness of it,

as if he has wrapped each word
   in cumulonimbus, as if gentleness
     is the only obvious path, as if I, too,

might offer such gentleness
   to someone else with words
     spun of nimbostratus, with syllables

of cirrus, with thoughts as cushiony
   as the clouds we once drew as kids,
     those clouds we once lived in

before we were told we could not.

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The Neighbor’s Kid

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on December 10, 2016| Leave a Comment »

 

 

 

Baring my claws for the pleasure of retracting them, choosing again to be gentle.

 

 

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