Daughter

My answer to the good and bad shocks of life has always been to write about them, maybe years down the road as an experience shaded to fit some character I am writing about. Recently my daughter Jennifer, who battled encephalitis and coma for her very life, was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, an insidious and incurable systemic disease I have battled for 35 years, more than half my life. Occasionally poetical with words, not at all a poet, this is what emerged about passing things on.

                 Daughter

  

She comes to visit limping across the yard

along uneven areas of grass and gravel,

favoring her stiff knees, twisting left hip

to swing her leg out to avoid bending it,

every ginger step at the corners of her eyes

as wrinkles appearing and smoothing quickly,

stamped like the beating of her heart.

Smiling, raising wrapped hand, greeting

her mother near the small plum tree snowy

in first bloom, hugging, bound hand on

her mother’s back, another hard-earned smile

and allowing her face to be touched, studied.

Turning body with stiff neck, flashing eyes,

quickly a gritty smile, nodding to her father

on the deck, he lifting a beer, remembering.

The porch steps, the onset, tears in big eyes,

pain-rendered with questions, greeting

dying in his throat, his own swollen hands

little help, useless joints, fingertip sparks

transmitting traits and quirks and bumps,

eye and hair color and skin tone to kin,

the family body made manifest, her spirit

fired at times mixing spirits, locked cells

behind brave new faces, love and fear

constant companions, the gravity of living.

Doppelganger

   Unlike the Wilsons, my mother's side of the family, the Cothern family never has a reunion, not until long after my father and his parents are deceased. Uncle Kellon, my father's youngest brother, finally calls one day and says he invited the entire family for a Sunday get-together at his house on Blackwater Road. Good idea, everyone says, why haven't we done this before?

   Uncle Dulith's family is the last to arrive, approaching the rest of us sitting in chairs under some oaks. When he is close enough, smiling in his sly way like always, as if perpetually amused by everything around him, privy to humorous secrets the rest of us can't fathom, the resemblance between Dulith and my father is so uncanny it is my father standing there in the shade among us. A glance at my brother Wayne, mutual shakes of our heads and deep breaths, feeling faint myself, scalp prickling coldly like that day in the hospital when a heart attack claims my father at age 58.

    The day after Laurie's first birthday on Bernardo Street, I stand beside the bed in the emergency room, watching my father's fingers moving across his own shoulders, showing the doctor where the pain is. I tear through his wallet after my father tells me to get the typed paper listing the medicines he has been allergic to over the years.

   Penicillin.

   Codeine.

   Percodan.

   Phenaphen.

   Etc.

   Etc.

   A note I retype many times over the years--each time another medicine needs to be added because of some adverse reaction.

   So I find the last note I typed years before on a hot afternoon after school--little dreaming I will be there to hand the note to a doctor, both of us standing next to my father in the emergency room, him sitting up in the bed, retching into a chrome basin from the pain in his back.

   "What about Demerol?' the doctor asks that Sunday after quickly reading the list. "And what the hell does etcetera, etcetera mean?"

   Seeing Uncle Dulith at that first Cothern reunion is like standing there in the hospital with no answer for the doctor; the feeling of fainting and the absurdity of safeguards because the memory of a man can be so strongly stamped in another's face.