Window Visit
Outside the rehab window,
my three-year-old wears yellow fairy wings
and waves a bubble wand.
Inside, my dying aunt wears a
tube in her nose and gives
an exaggerated wink from her
wheelchair, watches my daughter
dance to an imaginary violin
in the hospital courtyard.
I sit on a strip of pavement and
nurse my newborn son
like we aren’t saying goodbye
through three panes of glass.
My husband, beside me,
smiles under a blue mask.
Covid-19 protocol:
twenty-minute window visits,
even for the palliative unit.
Death pools under my aunt’s eyes
in hollow, black half-moons.
Lung cancer. Everywhere, now.
She points to my tiny son and
cradles her arms as though
she’s rocking him, mouths, so cute.
I point to her fleece robe and
hug myself to say, that looks comfy.
We cannot hear each other.
“Sound is the last sense to go,”
the Hospice nurse said.
The silence swells, like sentiment
or sorrow or the humid summer air.
My daughter blows bubbles
with my husband.
A butterfly flits by. My son coos.
My aunt tilts her head to the side,
hiccups, repositions, and then,
then the bile and vomit gurgle up
from her fluid-filled lungs.
Her hand jerks to cover her mouth
but the liquid seeps through her fingers.
There is no call button.
I jump up, shield my daughter.
“Help!” I yell and pound
on an emergency exit door.
I’m sorry, my aunt mouths as
my daughter spins around and around,
somehow unseeing, unfazed.
Medicine, my aunt mouths and
I think she needs medicine,
but it’s actually that her medicine
won’t stay down. It keeps coming.
“Help!” I yell, again. I fist the door.
My husband runs to the front.
My son starts to cry.
My aunt chokes.
My daughter pirouettes.
A nurse runs down the corridor.
My aunt is whisked away.
And I—
I stand breathless outside the glass.
* * *
Reflection:
The poet Charles Simic talks about obsessive images—those images that get caught in our subconscious filter. We can’t rid ourselves of them. We always return to them. They often haunt us. No matter how much “work” we do on ourselves, they never leave us. They are the stuff of trauma, the icons of mourning, the bits of shrapnel we carry through the span of our lives.
My window visit with Aunt Kathy is one of these for me. I keep coming back to it.
The writer Steve Almond argues that our obsessions are our muse. He wrote an entire book about candy. A writer friend of mine talks about her daughter’s purple toenail polish the night she found her overdosed from heroine. The poet Walter Butts writes about birds. Flocks of birds, in most of his poems. Hemingway constantly circles death.
I write about grief wounds. They are those deeply-seared moments, or things, or scraps of dialogue that, like Simic’s obsessive images, don’t leave my psyche. They keep me in a state of mourning, not processing.
While I did get another visit with Aunt Kathy— actually got to hug her a week later, when the hospital visitation policy changed—this moment at the window had a more profound impact on me even than holding her death-fragile body, or the moment she got to hold my newborn son just twenty-four hours before died.
The window visit was a moment of physical separation so visceral that I actually felt her death. Or perhaps more accurately, I felt the overwhelming powerlessness of the moment our lived experience with someone ends—when we are forced to accept the loss.
To honor the impact of these moments, I write them not so much to relive them (that keeps me in rumination), but more to “un-live” them: to consciously examine and remove them from my body through the act of penning them. This process makes the obsessive grief wound an object—an other—that I can un-lodge; it gives me the ability to either examine them or set them aside, as necessary. It is not only cathartic, but a profound act of self-love. As I externalize the wound, something miraculous happens: I gain one of the only powers we have after someone we love dies—the power of choice. To honor or deny. To feel or suppress. To hold on or release.
