I spoke of you today. I did not say your name. I think of you today, when we eat cake for breakfast. How, at the meetings, tiny as you were to begin with, as diminished as you came to be each time—each time noticeably smaller—you came bearing a box, a big box—especially in comparison to you—a box bearing a cake, a big cake. And you placed it on the credenza, in that lovely room with the view of the Bay that almost resembles a living room, if you don’t know the true purpose of the warm-toned leather recliners; you placed it on the left side, and you placed it there for a reason. We start our dinner buffet from the left, and you always, you said, ate dessert first. Even when you couldn’t eat, you sliced a piece and placed it on your plate. I loved that about you.

So today, dear girl, dear tiny girl, now no longer a girl, a woman, a mother of two, now a pile of ash and crushed bone, in the Buddhist tradition of your birth; buried in a cemetery, presided over by a rabbi, out of respect for your husband and children; today, dear lovely, dear you, who valiantly dressed up in tiny and tinier black dresses—classic, elegant—and ballet flats; who donned a wig when, once again, your hair was gone—a black wig with straight hair and bangs, hair that looked just like your own—in a dauntless struggle against the moment when you would have to pass from lightness to darkness; who applied full makeup and ignored the creeping nausea and encroaching fatigue, just so you could be with us in our circle that gets smaller by one, two, or even three each year—one year, this year, five!—today I eat two slices of cake for breakfast, and I think of you.

* * *

I think of you, dear you, and I wonder about those last hours. I wonder if you knew it was coming, coming right then, happening right then, and you decided not to know until the moment when that was no longer possible. That moment when your breath was emptying out, and you told B., you whispered because, of course, that’s all your lungs would allow, you whispered, “My brain is foggy.” Then, by then, right then, there wasn’t much time, much more time, the time was almost up, the breath was almost gone. You must have known, I tell myself you must have known, that you were about to make that leap from here to not here, from now to beyond now, from the heaviness of a breaking-down body, to a lightness of who knows what.

I tell myself this because I want to believe you had some peace there, finally, if only for a minute or two—who knows how long a minute really is in that altered space of thinning veils and passing through—and that when you closed your eyes, finally and forever, it was all right, just a piece of cake.

—-

13 July 2013
Birdland Summer Retreat

Prompt: “The Letter” (poem)
“about to jump from lightness to darkness/suspended from the sky”