before

fall 2018

Tomorrow is my first med school final,

and I can’t seem to fit all this knowledge

inside my straining, stretching mind.

I’m at the window in the afternoon sun,

taking notes on cells and how they grow

and change and move and fall apart

and here are drugs we use to kill them

when they lose their little minds and turn to cancer,

morphing, widening like I only wish

my mind would. Here are drugs that sound

familiar –

here’s a cell that sounds

familiar –

family-ar…

I have heard these names before.

You wore your white and purple pantsuit

with the floral decoupage you loved

and your white loafers, almost as white

as your neatly parted hair, a little whiter than

your neatly buffed, pale nails – they’d gotten so much

paler lately, while the purple stormcloud

of the bruise-like bumps along your leg got darker,

like somehow they pulled the color

out of all the rest of you,

those cells whose name I’ve heard before.

The doctor was an optimist, that was his job –

the rest of us were watching, unsure –

you already knew, I think. The same way you knew

I’d be a doctor from the minute

I said I would like to be one – I think you knew

from the minute you agreed to try the chemo

but you tried it for all the rest of us.

Was it the cancer that took you from us,

or something inside you already knowing

you’d let these be the last drugs you tried,

these drugs whose names I’ve heard before?

Grandpa read you books that last afternoon,

when your last sun fell across the windowsill

where I sat dangling my scrub-clad legs –

the legs I got from Dad, the legs he got from you –

watching you two during the few short minutes

of my break. This was the ugliest,

most lovely ending I could ever think of,

you and Grandpa and the book and I

on an afternoon that makes this one
like an afternoon before.

I didn't really grieve, the night you died.

I lost myself in busyness, lapsed
into the future doctor – details, order –
and the family nurse – the place
you used to fill, way you used to try so hard

to bring us all together. But today

these cells are just like yours,

this is your drug, and these young legs

that I am dangling in the window sunfall –
I have seen these legs, just older,

painted purple, O’Keaffe-style. Grandma,

you’re still here, now, everywhere. And all
I want is time turned back
to you, before the bruises, drugs, cells,
afternoons of endings –  Grandma,
all I wanted back then,
all I want right now is

you, before.