fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

We Are Here

We are here.
At the foot of your bed,
I warm your limp feet in my hands.

A daughter cleans your mouth, a thirsty anemone.
Your only action is its eager suckle
of the sponge. My sister’s
offering is careful, sparse—
your retiring body can take little but air.

When that’s a challenge, my other sister
suctions your lungs, with awesome expertise.
She holds her breath.
It’s an old nurses’ trick, she says: “When
we need air, we know the patient needs a break, too.”

You receive her also, without struggle.
As quiet as the land,
you accept our final invasions—we
three who fed from you, climbed on you, kicked you
in the heart.

We are here.
You who made us, lie like a woman
we sisters built of sand. You are a part-time breather
now as, for days, you try out that stillness
that will soon overtake you.

I count thirty seconds of

silence
Then it starts again:
small waves of breath from far
away, lapping, lapping, building up to a breaker,
fading away
toward that far shore.

Again, silence.

Soon, the vessel of your breath
will sink below that horizon, never to return.
But we are all here, tonight.
Getting old now too, your daughters stay,
take turns, one on each side holding a hand,
heads resting on your bed.
The third sleeps on a nearby couch.

Then, as the window flickers
from indigo night to rosy autumn day, we rise.
“Another beautiful day, Mom,” we
announce, to your silence.

Oceanic night subsiding,
the season you love crisps auburn and gold
on the other side of the glass.

Still we are here, still together.
One’s head rolls sleepily on your shoulder.
Carrying three coffees, I watch the
other, wet-eyed, gaze at you.

We listen
to your inhalations, your exhalations.
While you breathe, we
are all here.

Together.

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Of Canadian-settler descent and living in Anishinaabe/Wendat territory in Toronto, Canada, Deb O’Rourke is a visual artist, a democratic educator, and a long-published community journalist and cultural critic. She has an MEd degree from York University, and a diploma in fine art. Her book on democratic education, Can this be School?, was published in 2022, by Artword Press. Her poetry has appeared in Intima, The New Quarterly, Little Blue Marble, Ars Medica and elsewhere.

About the Poem

“This poem is from my unpublished collection Sundowning, a book of poetry centered on my family’s experience as we supported our parents during their exit from this world. From disparate lives and cities, my sisters and I gathered to care for our mother and treasured our unity in that moment of partnership.”

Comments

5 thoughts on “We Are Here”

  1. Thank you for sharing this Incredible poem. For me, too, it took me right back to the hospital rooms where I (an only child), spent last days with my grandmother, my father, and then my mother.

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