Returning home from errands
on a rainy fall evening,
our arms loaded down
with grocery bags and backpacks,
my children and I pause
and listen to the sweetest bird song
coming from tightly woven holly bushes.
As they rush to the door
to get out of the rain, I linger

her right hand, intent on capturing
the two dogs’ faces, guides a pen: Frida
with her sugar-cone-shaped snout

and triangular ears, inky coat
a dead match for her eyes, orbs
only visible when light catches them,

Sylvia with her paper-plate-shaped face,
kitchen-mop fur, fangs, and ray-gun glare
demanding food food food. When the portraits

are drawn, Molly’s blue irises rise to meet mine
and we both grin. Hers, with a gap where a baby tooth
used to be, traded to a fairy last week for two dollars.

The priest did not come, for fear of Covid, but a very nice gentleman, whom we had never met, gave a very beautiful personal tribute to my sister, which was pretty amazing, seeing as he had never met her (such a great gift, don’t you think?) and then we all sang I’ll Fly Away, that beautiful old gospel hymn that says ‘When I die, Hallelujah, by and by, I’ll fly away’ – such a marvelous message for my sister who had the good fortune to slip away in her sleep (a gift from the angels, they say) before her dementia totally destroyed her and all of us, and so the whole thing ended up being a joyous celebration of death and flying and I have to say, I was so distracted by the Caryatids, the Pietà, the wind, the Chinese vase, the eulogy, the singing, and well, the beauty of the whole thing that it was all I could think about, and I wanted desperately to capture the scene with my iPhone, but thankfully was aware enough to feel in my still-living bones how inappropriate it would be to take a picture of such fine friends come to mourn with us, but I have to say, because I was not able to take that photograph, I will never be done with trying to describe the scene.

From the outside, I am helpless. I don’t know how you keep it all straight.  If only yours was the variation of Parkinson’s that only affects coordination and calms the tremors. That would have been a gift compared with what you got — a version that causes a relentless creep of dementia, like the hot lava flow that devours entire villages in the horror movies. You are slowly losing your mind, clinging to your grip on the day-to-day, but mostly reverting to what has come before in your life, grasping at memories of our growing-up years like they were yesterday, imagining that the eight of us are all crowded into the old Pontiac ‘woody’ station wagon to go to the drive-in, or that our youngest brother Michael is still alive, or that we still live in the old house on Thackeray Road, or that Mother and Dad are in the next room. They are not. But there are others too, you tell me. There’s a baby sleeping in a crib, who needs its diapers changed. There’s a little boy standing in your driveway, or a bunch of teenagers goofing off in the backyard.  You are constantly seeing the babies and children you were never able to have — the only one of the six of us who was unable to conceive – a particularly tough dose in a baby-centric family.  But the truth is, because of that, you were able to dote on all the children precisely because you were not preoccupied with your own.  You so enjoyed the role of the favorite auntie. Everyone looked forward to your Christmas brunch.  The invitation was for kids only.  None of us parents were allowed. Every year you would pick a theme and buy a special party favor for each child.  It was the event of the year.  The oldest of ‘the kids’ are now in their mid-fifties, but they’ve never forgotten The Brunch.

More and more, our phone calls have become strange and confusing.  You were a Latin teacher, a grammarian, a meticulous explainer of the ablative absolute or the anomalies of fifth declension or the use of the vocative case.  After many years of teaching, you went into real estate sales, where you were consumed by a business of money and appearances, growing a customer base, showing houses at a moment’s notice, even if it meant getting up from the middle of a dinner party.  And you were good at it!  You dressed as though your life depended on it, which it did.

So now, your telephone chat has become a strange invention of half-sentences and invented words — all with the correct, assured tone of voice of the salesman and the etymological know-how of the Latin teacher. It would be….grubble stang and so forth…so interesting, for instance…if the house weren’t…sub rosa…it’s only two doors down, but it’s the same…conglomeration…

And why should we be surprised when, before you can go out for a little walk, you decide to line up all your jewelry on your bed, to take inventory, to consider which pair of large sterling silver earrings you might choose to match the wilted black fleece sweatsuit you now wear every day, while the bright quilted jackets, elegant slips of silk blouses and tasteful black slacks lie fallow in your closet.

And the pills keep changing, this one combatting the decline of motor function, that one batting back dementia, a Hobson’s choice between two distasteful outcomes, as you sail haltingly between the Scylla and Charybdis of a turbulent disease.  Funny, that on any given day, you still might remember those two treacherous cliffs described in Virgil’s Aeneid, a treasure shared by several of us in our classics-crazy household!

You were always the fancy one in the family.  I envied your pink flowery canopy bed and the delicate white secretary desk in the corner, where you wrote neatly in little notebooks, in a handwriting that was so elegant people would ask you to do their wedding invitations.  I was only four years younger than you and was probably in line for the canopy and the desk, but the world seemed to shift in those four years — from stockings, silk dresses and patent leather pocketbooks to torn jeans and bandanas.

Your stories and concerns are often filled now with paranoia and apprehensions, suspicions or fears of criticism. I try to untangle what is disease and what is part of your DNA, from our family that seemed full of laughter, happiness and success, but which also hid a raw underbelly of competition, fear of failure and thin skin.

You are the canary-in-the-coal mine of the family now, laying bare all of our inner faults — the limitations and neuroses that the rest of us are still capable of disguising with the quick two-step of Irish wit.

They remind me of the Bongo Board, mom
balanced barefooted in our den, on a seesaw of sorts,
auburn hair flipped at the shoulder,

red luster upstages fluorescents of a Pucci minidress,
her satin slingbacks dyed pink to match, now tossed
atop a pile of Penny Loafers and Buck Oxfords.

A gin martini rests effortlessly in the cup of her left hand,
the olive floats, motionless, synced to the rhythm of smooth glides,
an act to upstage Getz/Gilberto and Bossa Nova sounds

of Ipanema. Dinner guests fill ash trays,
sip Galliano from espresso cups, their ritual digestif
to fondue, plates left to crust on the table til morning.

I never told mom I found the polaroid negatives in the trash,
the developer paste revealed unfamiliar body parts in reverse,
enough form to feel relief that I slept through the night.

This morning, I admired mom in her butterfly
flannel PJs, crumbs on her chest, swollen knuckles
struggling to squeeze a lemon wedge into her Darjeeling tea.

Today, I am overjoyed – and maybe a little overwhelmed. You are my daughter… loved and cherished since conception. I know this is the absolute happiest time for you, and in only a few minutes, you’ll walk down the aisle to the man of your dreams.

And my heart runneth over.

I knew just what I wanted to say. In fact, I wrote this speech weeks ago. I memorized it, and I practiced it. But right now, with you standing before me looking so radiant, I’m speechless. All I can think to say is ‘Alexander is one lucky guy.’

I watch him.

I watch him when you walk in the room, and he lights up. His eyes. His smile. His heart.

And I watch you, Elizabeth, when he walks in the room, and you light up. Your eyes and smile and heart.

And when the two of you walk into a room together, everyone around you lights up! It’s magic. Fairytale magic like the sparkly swirls you see whirling above Cinderella’s and Prince Charming’s head. And this magic, well, I noticed it between the two of you years ago. Some people live a life without it, but you two – you have it, and I know you’ll keep it for a lifetime.

So, my toast to you, my darling daughter, is to magic. May you keep it and savor it, endlessly and always. May you experience it in a million tiny ways. 

To magic. 

where heroines smoke PallMalls like they mean it.

She grips the pins between smudged red lips, her breath coming in emphysematic wheezes, moving on her knees around the fabric on the floor of her bedroom, cutting away a pattern only she can see. Your great-great-grandmother, she says, was a Russian Princess, (ice like diamonds shining in the not-water glass on her dressing table). A different day and the great-great-grandmother might be a Prussian princess, or German, or Austrian, or

Romanian, I ask thinking of gypsies,
No silly, she says.
I thought my mother was mean to steal all her bottles from their hiding places.

She loops her stories around herself,

Grandfather. Leather straps creak against the stump below his knee. He lowers himself into his chair, surveying his battlefield, the small table between us where I have laid out the chessboard the way he taught me. He uses both hands to lift and stretch out his wooden leg to one side. Only the first wooden leg had actually been wood. Its successors were named wooden legs like new generations of some recalcitrant family pet. This one is made of pale-peach plastic, swooping gracelessly down to mannequin toes. This one creaks and groans in new places since the time years ago when he saved me from drowning in the swimming pool. He tells me the secret of the Laird of Drumblair, our great-grandfather, while plucking my chess pieces from the board. I watch the massacre and learn the secret history of faithless great-great-great-grandfather, the Laird. Scotland, he concludes with a sigh, and probably a checkmate or at least a check—that’s where people speak proper English.

He loops his stories around himself,
pulling tighter with every year,

Father. He spent months in Scotland and never found a trace of Drumblair. He brought back a tam o’shanter and kilt in the family tartan that faded from memory in the kist.
Tell me about your mother, I ask him.
I don’t remember her, he says, turning away with a shake of his head.
Let the grief-fire run and it will burn down the damn house.
Tell me about your wife, my mother,
tell me about us, your children,
tell me about me,
tell me,
tell me, please,
tell me anything at all.
It got so even his happiness was like anger—laughter that was a shout or a joke that made someone else wince—then the anger was just a fathomless weariness with tumour-shaped teeth eating him from the inside out.

I loop and loop and loop,

Mother. Tell me about your father.
I don’t talk about him, says my mother turning away, her lips thin.
Let the anger-fire run and it will burn down the damn house,
and all of us with it.

We loop our stories around ourselves,
into a life shape
pulling tighter with every year
A skein from which I try to weave another story.

I come from a family of
drunks and artists and drunken artists
the sad-savage
the dream-thwarted
the deluded
the pragmatists,
I come from a line of
wanderers and nomads
lamenting that they don’t belong,
refusing to belong.

My family is as real as its storytellers. My family is as real as the empty boxes on our family tree. My family is as real as stick figures,

A skein from which one of us will weave another story.

My husband, hands poised on the open car door
listens to my grievances
He always checks the leash
Why can’t I do that?
I tell him
Everyone needs to be responsible, never leave the leash empty

He drives off
And all I can see are the leaves littering our yard
And all I can hear is the whirling exchange of words,
Rake in hand
Agitated, like the wind scattering the leaves
What about my daughter?  Where is she?  When will she come down to help?
Amidst this chorus of complaints
My mind leaps,
changing direction like a spinning weathervane

I recall a photograph, one of many, flashing on the news
faces from the mass shootings, two this week
An Asian woman smiles next to her two sons
And I wonder
What did she say to her young men as she went off to work?
Was it of forgotten chores or next week’s schedule?
Dinner is in the fridge?
Words of love disguised as lectures, expectations, mundane reminders?
Smiling and not knowing, tomorrow everything will change

I shake my head free of this imagined moment
Gazing down at the little piles of sticky blossoms,
soaked in rain, heavy with loss
Over head the tree is abundant and ripening
Tiny avocados among blossoms still yellow-green
I keep raking and raking
Believing that I will indeed kiss my husband when he returns
And I will soon smile at my daughter when I go inside
And next time I will remember to check the leash before I go out
And I wonder
Who is responsible?
And I wonder
Who knows when your words will be your last?
And I wonder
Will my words be like fallen leaves?
Or will they be blossoming with life?