Adding it up
24 March 2011 10:43 AM Categories: Quotidian existence
My mother and I have always been good at taking bad situations and making them funny, using dark humor to get through dark times. When Emmet the crazy black cat, a nice bit of fluff and bones and wild eyes, sneaked into my room and killed my dwarf rabbit, we joked that we could use the bunny’s corpse for a Halloween decoration, maybe tie it to some sort of noose and hang it on the front porch. When it came time to sell the house we had shared with my stepfather, we traced our outlines on the walls of his weight room, shaky portraits of us in victorious poses, leaping into the air, laughing at what he would think when he saw them.
I remember Christmas season 2001 in the hospital, a thin Kevin draped on the bed, the tubes and wires tying him down, the dark mucous that spewed from his trach when he coughed, our discussion of Christmas TV specials and Burl Ives. He was coherent for much of that month, almost like the old Kevin. “Have a hol –ly jol – ly Christ-mas,” he wheezed in a particularly ludicrous way, flopping his hands back and forth. We all laughed.
Kevin died nine years ago today. It’s raining here, raining very hard and as I type the rain drums along, not in any sort of rhythmic way. It’s never-ending and relentless. You couldn’t write music to it or make any pattern out of the falling. During Kevin’s funeral, a ceremony jammed in right before Easter, the priest made a reference to Kevin’s “elderly” dog, Woody. I don’t know what it was about that – Woody seemed in the prime of life, though he got lymphoma and died less than two years later – but Kevin’s son and I just started to laugh. The silent giggles enveloped us as we thought of solid sweet Woody, young and energetic, being characterized as something he wasn’t to make a eulogist's point.
Kevin, I’m sorry that I was so reluctant to read at your funeral, that I didn’t volunteer quickly. I don’t even remember what I read, but I do remember thinking that we were a pathetic crew, letting history and your too-strong personality influence how we said goodbye. You were the last of my mother’s husbands, though you never were an actual husband, and I hear the rain and wish I could make a sick joke, wish I could hear you laugh. But I know the ambiguity between us would have lasted until the end, that it's still here, stronger than death.
Dear Carol,
Today, riding my bike, I remembered a dream:
It was a cool, bright morning in mid-October.
We were bicycling through the part of town
where the past and the future are one.
We came to the little rowhouse
where I lived when I first met you.
An old woman who looked like my grandmother
sat in a rocking chair on the porch.
There was an empty chair next to her.
Beside her, on the floor, lay a big grey collie.
"Carol, Daniel," I said. "Wait. It's Barney!"
But you kept going.
"Here Barney," I said.
He got up and came over to the edge of the yard,
but not close enough so that I could touch him.
I started to get off my bike,
but my grandmother said,
"You can't come here now.
You have to go with them."
I looked up the street.
You and Daniel had stopped
and were looking back in my direction,
but I could see that you could not see me.
I pedaled down to the river;
it wrinkled dark and green.
A kingfisher caught a fish like a silver comma
and flew into a sycamore tree.
-- Kevin Sheehan, published in Slow Dancer (North American edition), No. 29, Spring 1993
Image: Kevin at 38. This was taken at Hoopes Reservoir in 1984 around the time that my mother met him.
I'm pretty sure he wrote this poem right before his diagnosis of myelofibrosis.
From today's prompt: Count them.
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