Death

Richard Alpert and Timothy Leary star in the daily documentary

and tell us Death is beautiful.

Acid, gurus and, mostly, friendship

have shown them this.

Imprisonment, heartbreak, cancer and a stroke,

have affirmed it too.

I have felt Death’s presence a few times.

During childbirth, always.

Racing down the interstate once, or twice.

In a holding cell of the county jail.

In the hospital after a playground accident shattered the bone

around my son’s left eye.

Death came in college all the nights I waited in the ER beside my boyfriend,

his body weak from bouts of diabetes-induced trauma,

complicated by the slow suicide of self neglect.

Later, when I came to question whether my own life had any worth,

Death met me beside the railroad tracks outside my home.

We sat together through all the hours and tears it took to lose my religion,

aligning myself with a new doctrine

of agnostic wonder, personal fidelity and St. John’s Wort.

A month after I found my tumors, I told a friend I thought I had cancer.

She drew a tarot card for me, Death, and became alarmed.

I assured her that Death is kind.

I must confess, there is still a part of me

which sometimes wonders whether I really died

my first time drinking Ayahuasca,

my body now in a heap within the dirt, high atop a mountain,

my current musings the hallucinations of a specter

comically out of touch with her own mortality.

That night on Aya, I felt as though a flock of hummingbirds surrounded me.

They returned years later when I stood

beside my grandmother Laura’s bed in hospice.

The following fall, my other grandmother, Alice,

died the day I asked for divorce.

Tears pooled under my eyes,

my shaking hand searching the dark ground for my lost keys,

I felt Alice speak through Death to me:

Trust the beauty of cycles ending.

We all stay until it’s safe to leave.

"Death" originally appeared within my publication BAMF Mag on Medium.com. Please follow this link to subscribe to The Grey Rose Garden, where I share even more writing about the ways hope blooms in the dark.