Grieving the Living

I can’t remember the last time

I truly said goodbye.

Or if I ever did—

when would have been the moment?

Was it when I was sixteen,

tossing my pom poms under the stadium lights

or when I was 19, a backward-sliding

reprobate, who absconded while she was

imploding, as she labored to keep us

solvent after enduring her own

abandonment?

Or further back,

when I mistook dysfunction for motherly love?

Was goodbye when she wouldn’t take her

sunglasses off in indoor buildings,

or when she lost all of her teeth too young,

her body already collapsing ?

Was it when I anesthetized myself with drink

instead of remaining—

when she was most profoundly groaning?

Goodbye was when she succumbed.

Consented to her fractured destiny.

If it was valid by fault,

she would welcome the wither.

Resistance had never altered her outcome.

Perhaps goodbye occurred when the

doctor pronounced me malignantly ill,

and she was the only one I couldn’t call.

I should have said goodbye

when a glimmer of her still saw me

as someone with ambition,

not a target.

I didn’t know goodbyes

had been goodbye-ing all along—

a slow simmering dead cow.

Death without the funeral.

Love and grief are the same emotion,

one does not require the absence of a

pulse to endure it.

Now goodbye is everyday,

when I see her

pushing her cart down the street.