Jacqueline Dooley ~

I was unprepared
for the feel of your hair pulling free
with every brushstroke.
I wasn't up to autumn
from the side of your hospital bed.
It seemed too much
for the universe to ask.
But, like you, I was choiceless
as I drove through November streets
the colors, drained and faded,
like your face when the chemo went in,
reduced to nothing more
than what I was when you were born.
I covered your exposed head.
I tried to stop your tears.

 

 

 

Ryan Nesbit ~

From second through fifth grade, I mastered the art of being sick. I got out of school, soccer practice and piano lessons so that I could be the child I wanted to be--not sick, but loved, cared for.

Here was my recipe:

1. Wake up.
2. Feel anxious about the day to come (this was natural).
3. Let the anxiety morph into a sickly pallor.
4. Bolster suspected illness with refusal to eat Life cereal (it was always plain Life cereal; that's the kind of kid I was).
5. Gulp a mouthful of hot tea.
6. Place tea underneath tongue just so.
7. Insert thermometer beneath tongue.
8. Wait for Mom to enter, her caring furrowed deep in her brow.
9. 101 degrees Fahrenheit = no school today.

Damn, I was a manipulative kid; I know that now. One year, for the entire month of April, I didn't go to my weekly piano lessons once. They upset me, but I attributed my tears to a pollen allergy that somehow only acted up on the walk across the street to my piano teacher's home. I played sick more often than I actually was sick. Although I was too young to know what "manipulative" meant, I felt guilty about pretending.