Month: March 2018

Candles

Candles

My mother never liked candles.

Twice they were responsible

for a childhood blaze.

Now, like a candle,

her life wanes.

 

Her lips form soundless shapes

on January 9th,

“Happy Birthday.”

She smiles bright and sleepily

even when she’s held me to

her swelling belly

after I cried to “You are my sunshine,” on the guitar.

She mouths, “I love you, “

as if she’s drifting.

 

Sailing on the lip of a parting boat

and I am her shore.

The ocean between us grows by the hour.

 

Her glow extinguishes

with every breath,

her soul relinquished,

lying dazed, unfocused, silent –

she becomes far.

 

Her body rancid,

we count the days,

her wick dims placid.

 

A piece of my heart,

a piece of her goes.

I pray God carries her

afloat like music notes,

as she slowly sets like a sun,

into a gentle wisp of smoke.

 

Tallow lessened into rest

until her time has run.

Ended to infinite slumber,

from ember to ashes,

a votive that has un-mothered.

 

– Rachel R. Vasquez, February 2018

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

 

I wrote this in February within the weeks my mother was becoming less like herself. By then she was in a nursing home, intubated via tracheotomy, and Pleurx catheters in her lungs and stomach. Although she survived a bout of pneumonia in December and January appeared hopeful, as February rolled in, I noticed she was sleeping more, becoming less focused, and forgetting things you told her minutes before. The cancer was progressing fast. A church friend of hers sat with me and said it reminded her of her father, who, like a candle, dimmed each day until he wasn’t there anymore. I wrote this praying that if I could not keep her, that God at least take her peacefully, without pain.

Room 10-24

Room 10-24

There was a woman I didn’t recognize,

the same color as the walls,

stacked like a house of sticks frail enough to knock over with a touch,

waiting for her daughter.

And I,

looking for my mother

popped my head into each room desperately.

In the room I passed

this woman I didn’t recognize was

until my cousin said,

“That’s her!”

I’m here mama. I tell her I love her, kiss her short haired head, and hold her hands.

I try to focus on her smile and not the tubes.

I come home guilty because

for just a brief second

she was a woman I thought I didn’t know,

until she was my mother again.

 

– Rachel R. Vasquez, November 2017

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

 

This is the first poem I’ve put on this site for 2018. I have gone on internet hiatus with social media, my blogs, and writing in general since October. There’s no easy way to say any of this, but my mother, my sweet mama who I lovingly refer to as “mamasita”, died in February after a 4 year fight with stage 4 breast cancer. My life has been whole heartedly focused on the last 6 months of my mother’s life and now that it is “over”, I have never felt so – angry. Lonely. Heartbroken. Lost. Out of place in this world. Like I’m living in a twilight zone where everything else moves when for me, it’s like the sun has been blotted out of the skies.

I’ve spent my life writing. My mother knew I loved to write. And though I haven’t felt like myself in months, and I can’t imagine a future where one day, “this” will feel okay, I know that this is step one. Step one: Get back on my blog, my twitters, and write. Do the thing I know I loved once and hopefully it will get me through, one day at a time.

I am thinking of creating a blog dedicated to the last 6 months of her life- of my life when she existed in it. There are so many emotions and so many lessons learned, writing seems the only way to get it out of me. Until this new blog comes into existence, this is one of the first things I wrote as things began to go downhill. When I was beginning to face the fact that my mother was dying.

She was in the first of what would be a weekly routine of urgent care and hospital stays before the climax in December and the end in February. I was looking for her room in Memorial Sloan Kettering with my cousin, and I passed right by it. I peeked in there, saw a woman looking down at the floor, and I didn’t recognize my own mother. I kept going, trying to find her, when my cousin pulled me back saying that she was in the room I’d just dismissed.

When I realized that I didn’t recognize my mother, it was terrifying, and I felt incredibly guilty. I would never tell my mother that I didn’t recognize her. I cried when I got home that evening when I told my husband about it. I’m crying just writing this, but I’ve gotten this far! I’m typing! I’m going to keep trying and no matter how painful, I’m going to vent this in one of the only ways I know how.

If you have a mother alive, please, cherish her always.