"A System's Failure"

"A System Failure"

Deep beneath the cracks in your armor

Lies a soul where buried self- admissions were reading as a scroll:

a map to an ultimate destiny that left for us no time to be calmer

yet for all the shame that turned into cancer

you still left me with more questions than answers.

Deferred to me on all the decisions you refused to make

so when I took liberties with your own words and wishes

you remained obstinately defiant

when to me to keep you alive

was not a hard decision at which to arrive.

The biopsy was a no-go.

The doctors said you had days to weeks;

You were deemed too stubborn tor chemo.

The goal was to make you as comfortable as possible.

In the palms of our hands

where our curled fingers merged;

I already knew after speaking to your rehab roomie

there was more at play than had yet to be learned when you were coughing red loogies.

Hospitalized three times in the last six months,

and no one thought to look more closely inside his distended hernia once.

To be so insidiously stealthy as not to show itself before stage four,

exonerating doctors who try to talk people into sharing

their own innocent oblivion;

while my Dad's physical history excuses the inexcusable system thirty-five years on

from the abject failures of a system deemed wonderful

in the malpractice courts of second public opinion.

No feeding tubes, no ventilators -

to me those were the "extraordinary measures"

you did not want taken

When you thought I wasn't looking, I heard you say,

"I just want to die".

Still, I wonder when you said that

if you were in your right mind

or thought I wasn't there

so somehow it would be easier

to take the path of least resistance...

and leave me behind.

Your father, my grandfather of pancreatic

There's no sense being contrarian and arguing:

First they'll do nothing

before risking doing any harm;

Lack of action, a violation of the Oath Hypocratic.

Your sister, my aunt of ovarian

the family tree's

rotted terminally.