Death Call
3am. Dad’s voice: Get up.
Let’s go. (A school night.)
No washed face, partially
tucked shirt. We make for
the Chevy Astro at the funeral
home, drive it 80mph west
to the city, the windows down;
the wind in the empty hold
battering the metal — loud
caught there and the sound
of all the rushing deadened.
The van idles rough,
a shaking I can sleep to easy, but
it’s cold and a body is waiting for us.
The gurney has a hard latch.
I worry my hands will be frozen and unable
to release it, but all four legs fall fine.
She was Grandmother and matriarch.
The whole family immediately began the wake.
Couches full of bodies holding bodies
in laps and crying or eating ham
and rolls. The room smells like
gas from the old oven.
The house has settled like ours —
the ceiling and walls are veined with cracking.
I count doorways we will push through
as we navigate a woman out
of her legacy. What’s left of her
looks very quiet. Even the short gray
hairs along her lip are hushing.
We have to shut her door to reach her.
Unmake her bed and she is woman, more
than I’ve seen — in a nightie ridden up,
her genitals there, that mystery.
We wrap her in her own sheet to move
her and I remember raking, carrying leaves
in similar folds. I am slight and thankful
she’s not much bigger than I,
so the moving isn’t sweated.
We cover her completely.
If her soul leaving wasn’t enough,
now her body, too, a disappeared thing.
The doorways are all too narrow, so
we tilt the gurney with one arm
while the other holds her in place — I pray
she stays in place.
There are seven concrete steps to the lawn.
I count them aloud one by one.
I count everything so my mind doesn’t
catch grief and wear it like my own.
The wheels crunch over the frozen grass.
Her grandchildren walk beside me, beside her
like pallbearers. The wind picks up
and it hurts, how it tears through my jacket
like I’m not wearing one at all.
The grandchildren stop walking.
The wind brings them one last vision of her
that early morning — I want to burn it:
the sheet untangling
her gray legs
her nightie a ribbon
above what brought
their mothers into the world.
I stand in sad-shock
while dad rearranges the sheet
without a word. Then
we move her to the van.
Lock the gurney in place.
I sit in the passenger seat, count streetlights.
She smells like she is still alive.
Dad goodbyes the family, we drive,
the windows down, the smell of her
life mixing with the dead cold.