This is another unpublished poem that I wrote years ago about death after a long illness. Ironically, the poem is short. It was hard to write — how do you encapsulate the months of battle that precede the "hospice bed?" So often, I am tempted to write about the struggle to buy time and the bravery inherent in it, because the inevitability of losing always looms large. We forget, however, that there is courage, too, in choosing to walk away and enumerate the finite breaths one has left on one's own terms.
In my other life, which often feels more real than the musings of a "Sometimes Poet," I am a clinical researcher working on early cancer detection. Cancer treatment saves lives — there is no doubt about that — but really what does "saving" mean? We are always just bargaining for more time to fight the fight we want to fight.
I chose to work in diagnostics, because I believe in a day when we will be able to detect this disease earlier than we can imagine today, and that early detection could lead to a cure, it could save us from having to fight so brutally. If we were living in that world today, my mother wouldn't have collapsed at 58 and stopped breathing six days after the twenty-third chemotherapy treatment. She wouldn't have been in this battle at all. She would have grown really, really old. She would have played with her grandchildren. She would have written more poems. She would have died of something else eventually, but not of something that killed her because she chose to treat it aggressively.
I am an optimistic researcher, but I remain a wistful poet.
Thank you for stopping by and reading.
