For Patti. I've been feeling uninspired these last few days, for posting and for most other things—strange, that I had to jog my memory to know why. I always tend to fall into an eclipse this time of year: tomorrow is the anniversary of my sister's death. Thirty-five years ago she was eight, just a week from her First Communion, and I was almost ten; she and I and our two younger sisters had all had chickenpox, but Patti got sick again as the rest of us recovered. (Some weeks after her death, I heard the word "encephalitis"—from a friend, who had heard it from his parents; my own parents never spoke Patti's name to me again, or even alluded to her having existed, after she was gone. It was only many years later that I learned that it was Reye's Syndrome, little known at the time, that had killed her.) My last memory of her alive is of a little girl, delirious with fever, stretched out on the back seat of our big Chevy, my sisters and I crowded in the front. My mother has Patti's head in her lap, trying to cool her with a washcloth and ice. We're on our way to be dropped off at my grandparents', where we'll be staying, before they take Patti to the hospital. An image presents itself to me, a gravestone with my sister's name on it and the year, 1970, marked as the second date. In a guilty panic I try to shove it out of my mind: days later, when my priest uncle comes to tell us she's died, my first thought is that it was my imagination that made it happen.

For Patti, then, and because I have no power to write it for myself, Emily Dickinson: even if it's a poem of romatnic mourning, still the most intense, compressed expression of grief I know in the language:

I never lost as much but twice,
And that was in the sod.
Twice have I stood a beggar
Before the door of God!

Angels — twice descending
Reimbursed my store —
Burglar! Banker — Father!
I am poor once more!

posted by michael  7:28:39 PM  
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