Waiting for her for fifteen minutes, Mother, why does it take so long, all these minutes,
aren’t you ready yet, my seven-year-old life held up until she’s made herself presentable,
my life held back, unable to separate, a membrane containing me, yet of course this is my
life who else’s could it be, and at its end if it’s a slow end there will be one thing
imagined and perhaps one more thing, then perhaps a sensation as of warmth or cold, of
blockage or flow, a light, a sound, which doesn’t resolve into an image of anything and
the sense of waiting won’t be there, there won’t be anyone there to wait for any longer
and this is a difference between being seven with a life to grow into and dying. One of
her last morphinated words, her eyes long closed, was indigo. She was thinking of nice
things which had been done for her, nice places she had been, Indigo Landing was a
restaurant we’d visited the week before, where she’d ordered sliders, three tiny
hamburgers on a long slender plate, she’d eaten one and brought the others back to her
apartment fridge at the assisted living place. We’d seen sailboats, planes taking off and
landing, the blue waters of the Potomac, the lush press onward of lives wanting nice
things, the things you wait for and then you know why you were waiting, what glides on
guidelessly beyond plan or guile or dream and then beyond color, beyond noise, even the
jet roar overhead, into uncontainment, unwanting, unwaiting.