My mother is dying, and I am in a dunk tank. It is Field Day at our middle school, and I am wearing an oversized tee shirt and running shorts, sitting on a ledge as teenagers throw balls at a target that plummets me into freezing cold water. Over and over and over and over. I cannot catch my breath.
[Grief works this way. One moment, you are safe and dry, perched on a ledge in the sunlight, enjoying the delights of a summer afternoon. The next second, you are submerged, surrounded, paralyzed by the shock, scrambling for purchase, to breach the surface. And then you are back on the ledge, safe but shivering, dreading each moment, not sure whether to relax or to tense for another plunge.]
*
She’s gone. Somewhere I can’t catch her.
[A terrible game of hide and seek where you seek forever and never find.]
*
Trying to arrange photos on a board at the funeral home, the little magnets hell in my clumsy hands, I drop things, get frustrated. My brother walks by, tells me I am “making a mom face.” All day, every mourner tells me I look like her. Every time, I try to smile as something catches in my throat.
[The face of grief contorts, transforms itself into doppelganger, into crone, into puffer fish, into mask. I never know which face people will see.]
*
Spending time with my father at the house, I grow weary of watching reruns of SVU, so I start to clean. Those Midas receipts from 1998 for a car he no longer owns? Gone. Empty boxes for shoes, small appliances? Recycled. The back bedroom where my mother kept her things is filled with clutter from the last six weeks: urine pads, an iPhone cable, paper towels, half cases of soda, oxygen tubing. A laundry basket of her clothes, never put away from before she entered the hospital. I fold each item. A sweater catches and unravels as I place it in a drawer.
[Grief gets pushed into closets. A lid neatly placed on its box. But it doesn’t take kindly to being ignored. It bulges at the seams. It bends the corners. It won’t lay flat and its insides keep spilling out between the cracks. Its mess begs for attention. It wants to be noticed.]
*
Already she’s everywhere. I meet some friends for breakfast not remembering that the restaurant was one she frequented. Until I read the menu. Cassie’s Crepes. Her favorite. It startles me, but my friends are accustomed to my silences, so they don’t miss a beat and make their selections. I almost order the crepes, but I catch myself and ask for French toast instead.
[The recipe for grief is different for each person, for each loss. Some days grief wants to fill a body up until it bursts, feed its own need. Some days it wants to starve, become the only thing inside a hollow frame. Feast or famine. A hole that fills then drains.]
*
I still cannot catch my breath.
–
Donna Vorreyer is the author of Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story (Sundress Publications, 2016) and A House of Many Windows (Sundress, 2013) as well as eight chapbooks, most recently The Girl (Porkbelly Press, 2017). Her poems and reviews have appeared in numerous journals, including Waxwing, Rhino, Quarterly West, Poet Lore, Diode, and Sugar House Review.