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The Words
My mother said, "Of course,
it may be nothing, but your father
has a spot on his lung."
May, 1955: My father
at fifty-one could never
speak of dreadful things without tears.
When I went back home,
I kissed his cheek, which was not our habit.
In a letter my mother
asked me not to kiss him again
because it made him sad.
In two weeks, the exploratory
revealed an inoperable
lesion.
The doctors never
told him; he never asked
but read The Home Medical Guidebook.
Seven months later,
just after his fifty-second birthday -
his hearing and eyesight going,
his voice reduced to whispers,
using a walker and a commode,
always coughing, three days
before he died-he said,
"If anything should happen to me... ."