That Good Night

I am grateful for the readers' comments on "A Fine and Private Place." After all, death is, with love, the poet's most frequent subject. With death so often swept under the rug in decades past, perhaps it's refreshing for death now to be made public, as in the long dying of Elizabeth Edwards. She fought valiantly and when the time came, she yielded with dignity. We can only imagine her pain, her struggles with the side effects of medication, her fatigue. But we'll remember her aliveness in the face of death.

I thought of Mrs. Edwards especially in the light of Jane S's comment that we must rage, rage against the dying of the light, as Dylan Thomas urged his dying father. But eventually there might come a time when the dying person feels he or she has endured enough and prefers an end to the suffering. This was true of my mother after she had lived weeks in agony from a metasticized abdominal cancer. After she had achieved the escape she prayed for fervently, I wrote the following poem, which I chose to read last Friday night at the Cornelia Street Café:

How Sweet The Bye and Bye

               (For J.B.H.)

Once the pain preyed unrelenting

you could taste how bad

you wanted to go into that good night

you raged against the light

prayed for it to go out

for you no false heroics

just the stoic’s sort.

You could not taste at last

the bile rising to your palate

burned your taste buds out

as your huge tumor crushed gall

bladder and kidney and thrust down

your uterus till you could feel it fall

between your lips like a natural-

ly aborted fetus.

“‘There’s a land that is fairer than day’”

you sang me softly in the breath left you

“That’s where I want to be

where I won’t ever have to do

another goddamn thing I don’t want to . . .

‘I’ll be free in the sweet bye and bye.’”

Then you saw, being blind, the last dim light

your opalescent pupil could permit

and cunningly left behind your agony.