I’m Done With This Grieving

We watched you die on a blue-sky morning
as children played ball outside your hospital
window and tubes in your arms sucked your
veins until they were black and blue and your
blood pressure dropped to zero. Your ecstasy
of night finally relieved your pain and anguish
after leaving your four daughters behind. I
didn’t know much about your life before you
married Dad, for how could I have known what
you remembered—your past was your past,
you said, and you wouldn’t talk about it
even as you lay dying—a stoic to the end.
Besides, you were deaf and in massive pain.
Maybe it was my need, this craving necessity,
to write this poem, to grieve your dying,
to understand the facts of your childhood,
the only ones I know, abandoned by your father
at seven, never seeing him again, abused by
your mother’s boyfriend, who when drunk,
beat and whipped your younger brother—
one of four—you a child runaway. You didn’t
talk much about the Depression, but you were
hungry for days, you said, facts imprinted even
after your death. The terror of your childhood
haunted me, as if your past was an uninvited
load I had to remove so I could get on with
my own living. Well, it’s been a long time since
I have done this grieving. A very long time.