Take forever just a minute

Liver failure, said the specialist,

following months of my mother’s mystery

pain, fatigue, and headaches no acetaminophen

or glass of water would banish.

Mom’s name barely caught the bottom rung

of one long shaking ladder of a waiting list.

For long yellowing months she sat among company

like a sepia photo fading, slyly asking Dad

I’d like a smoke, or A glass of white, which he gently denied.

Dad stayed by her side day and night, he told me over the phone;

the bungalow became a palliative parlour, the hi-fi once

victoriously loud—with the Gibbs, Timmins, and Twain

(at our reception she’d sprung that disc on my new husband

I paid for this wedding, she ordered, play “Feel Like a Woman”

and dance with me, and flung him around the floor)

—now hushed, circled by nurses, her hours now shuttled

between her easy chair and the shuttered bedroom

where Dad sat watch and forgot how to sleep.

One May day after Dad’s late call about the latest

ambulance trip, I locked the house, packed the kids,

drove east for three days, came to stay, to aid, to say goodbye,

found Mom paper-thin, bones shining through skin, every shift

from recliner to bed left a lighter dent in the upholstery.

She couldn’t stand up by herself anymore.

Her name never rose one rung up the waiting list.

Her grandniece mailed a hinky get-well drawing of grave angels

praying for the heaven-bound; we never gave it to her.

I studied nurses slicing lavish helpings from their huge hearts.

I studied Dad’s devotions, attentions, and insomnia.

I changed her, bathed her, soothed each surly furuncle,

served her prune spoonfuls, helped her pass stone-sharp stools.

I stole moments to eat an English muffin with peanut butter

(Mom’s favourite snack); I encouraged my nervous daughters

to hold her hand and apprehend in these ways

the adult child’s dues I had come to pay.

I tempered my ministrations with mercenary practicalities:

rifled a box of unworn jewellery, pilfered the emerald

earrings I’d given her one Mother’s Day, replaced

them with the unwanted gallstone of recalling her call

my sister the less difficult daughter, and closed the box.

One night, suddenly upright, she stated, Life isn’t right

a curse on fortune to count among her last words

which, eulogizing later, Dad guessed she’d meant isn’t fair.

Another night, abruptly animate, she touched Dad’s cheek,

said “Come to bed,” which he gently declined, and they wept.

One day the kids and I came in to find the house flooded

by the Bee Gees’ “More Than a Woman” in the living room.

Mom and Dad were dancing, twirling slowly as an LP in the

pollen-dust sunlight:

Their dance, more defiance than farewell, arrested the kids,

spared this poem from attending a funeral and played it a love song instead

—we can take forever just a minute at a time—

Their dance turned all of us who saw them into mute pillars of salt,

astonished at the sight of love on its last legs

still intent on turning the world under its sure step.