Last Visit

My aunt drifts at the headboard

of a starched white hospital bed,

mouth gaped open, tongue cherry red 

from last night’s Jello. 

“This isn’t really alive,” she whispers.

 My newborn son—asleep at the base—

roots into air, cheeks puffed 

like peaches, lips slick with milk. 

Their eyelids are delicate as elegy and onion skin.

My midwife says the energy

of the dying is like the just-born.

My son breathes in. My aunt, out.

In the hallway, a door opens

then shuts.

 ________________

Reflection:

This poem was originally titled, “Torch Pass,” because a friend described the timing of my son’s birth and aunt’s death like the passing of a torch. The image, and concept, comforted me. It reassured me that there is, whether I like it or not, divine order to life and death: that one cannot exist without the other—that perhaps my son’s coming and my aunt’s going was orchestrated from beyond.

Eventually I scrubbed the title because the image of a newborn and a dying matriarch sitting at opposite ends of a hospital bed spoke so loudly. There they were: my son, a life stretched out like the horizon, and my aunt, a setting sun. Two ends of a lifespan.

What the poem doesn’t highlight is me, sitting between them. I had pulled a vinyl chair to the edge of the bed, one hand rocking my son’s car seat, the other twisted inside my aunt’s, as if I could prevent her slipping. I sat there, my arms stretched between them, just watching. If the lines of our lives made a parabola, I would have been right at the top of the curve. I was squarely in the middle of their age-spans: 0-36-72. The apex halfway between them. As they flickered, I bore on. 

A week before this, I had told my midwife that I was going to say goodbye to my aunt. She suggested that I observe how similar the newborn and dying actually are—to note the transience.

As I sat at the edge of the bed, I witnessed this likeness in their energies: a shared and tender fragility. Innocence, almost. There was circuitry between all of us, as though I were the crossing over point in the mysterious infinity loop that connects us all.

It was a pure, understated moment of universal consciousness.