It Feels Like Death, But I'm Still Breathing

Beginning September First three people I have loved died and I am so reluctant to also write, I had to kill my cat, Soot. He was seventeen, suffering kidney failure and suffering. I don't pander with people saying "I put my pet down" Down the fuck where? Or with peope, "He made the Great Crossing. Pal, He died. These poetic terms don't make me feel better, they aren't particularly the truth and they don't change the the way I feel inside, so I've decided to just say it like it is. I was too young in the sixties, but now I understand.

First on the list was my first husband the schizophrenic and the father of my first son. I loved him, I worked with his mental illness, we did well until his also schizophrenic brother showed up with a baggie of cocaine. This is a person I wouldn't mind killing. He offers nothing to society and no, I don't feel sorry for him. He chooses to make it worse with self-medication. My husband and I lived in the country, ate vegetarian or the occasional deer given to us by neighbors who I suspect were fearful of our starvation. We lived on $350 a month and I could do this. I grew up poor and I considered myself an expert at it. This was the mid-seventies. We smoked a large-ish ounce of pot a month and had two small jelly jars of cheap red wine an evening. This seemed to stay the demons. I had a secret stash of phenobarbatol the doctor gave me with instructions on how to use it. He rarely needed it. We share a doctor in this small town and the other day the doc said, "You know when you were pregnant out there in the woods, he was not schizophrenic." I was so proud. My methods had worked.He had worked on himself to the ability he could. But the cocaine changed it all and I had to take child and run for my life. He had tried to kill me several times. He moved to town after burning his cabin down around him and almost not making it out. This is what hard drugs do the mentally ill. I cried the first year I was gone, shivered with fear, reconstructed my life around our child's who inherited the genius , but not the mental illness. The night he died he was found outside on the highway naked and acting "strangely" , (police report). They took him to the hospital. There were two mental health workers on the floor. One of them said, "It's clear this man needs to be hospitalized." The other said,"He's fine , take him back to his motel. " He did not wake up the morning. It was days before anyone realized something was wrong. As next of kin, my son had to go into that room, ID and retrieve effects. I hope the mental health worker has a grown child who experiences this sometimes. I hope the parent left is willing to pay for some crisis therapy. Yes, I'm angry. That death didn't need to happen. Yes, he needed to stop using weird drugs (he had in high school been on his way to studying himself into a degree for ethno-botony I was told). He had been drinking copious amounts of alcohol but at the time of his death he had stopped drinking any thing but the occasional glass of wine or beer.He needed to get on a maintenance program, but he should not have been marked a 'useless part of society " and kicked down into the gutter again.

By the time I felt I could handle this and keep my son from grief-anger overdose, I got a phone from my cousin that the father of her daughter had a massive heart attack and died. We speak on the phone as often as I can afford it which is not much, but I email her often. Thanks to the dear friend who loaned me a fabulous laptop. She feels like she can never marry or date again.

There is some distance there. I hadn't seen my cousin since the eighties and she and her daughter reconnected last summer because the daughter felt she wanted to be a poet. And wanted my advice. I came through that safely when one morning, the phone rings and its the daughter of my best male friend. He's a painter; I'm a poet and I had just shown him, at his request how to tweak his poems into real poems. They were damn fine poems when he was done with minimum work. Her voice was off, I have to ask her what is wrong and there is gasping and fast light breathing before I realize I already know what she's going to say and I scream "NO" and the quieter, "when. She says, "This morning." I really cannot bear this. I have to sit down. Then I find myself back in bed, all my clothes on under the covers, the walk-around phone with me, listening to her tell me things I can't bear hearing.

Growing up I had read in books, Autumn is the month of death and I always took that to be a melancholy thing. More poetic than real. But I understand people die from the cold, or poor diets which make for germs to creep in. I have had to put this aside and let my emotions stew, mull around, I've had to let the sharp intake of breath hurt less and now, months later, I'm able to write. I always thought I would be the one to die first. I expect with my heart condition to die early and yet I'm fifty-four. A miracle.

I go outside and stare into the blackness. I always go outside when my emotions get too big for my chest. Slowly, my vision stops looking inside myself. I stop thinking of myself. Stars begin emerging. I give them names. Now, my dead are not lost. On the clear nights I will be able to see them, talk to them and the nights full of white, covered with fog, I'll reach out my voice like a hand and wrap it around a star of someone in particular and pull it into my heart. I'll let the star beat for my heart instead of my pacemaker. I'll let the star become my little/gigantic machine of love.