Some Believe the Comatose Can Hear

I lost my mom, Annie Marie Morgan, in 2001. With her, I have regrets. I was crawling out of the tail end of my depression so I didn’t spend a lot of time with her. I tried to pick her up every other week to go to the movies. It was easy time to spend with her because we didn’t have endless conversations. Moving past the weather, I had little to say as did she.

For years, her grief laid heavy on her. She had lost her parents to death. Her father died of colon cancer and her mother was found dead on the bathroom floor six days later. In the next month she would lose my dad, her husband, to another woman. 6 months later her boyfriend who promised to marry her would also did of cancer.

I had no idea that my mother was slowly dying from alcoholism. I knew she drank too much and I wanted her sober but before that happened alcohol stole her life. She was walking around on a Thursday and then was comatose on Friday. Her liver had simply stopped working.

The following is a poem I wrote chronicling her last days.

Names Bear the Weight of Forever

My mother doesn’t initially die.

She first goes into a coma.

drink vodka out of a coffee cup.

Be too drunk at noon to buy

sandwich meat at the deli

or replace moldy bread.

Her granddaughter pounds on her door

wanting to play toy soldiers with giraffes.

Instead of getting up,

the bed swallows her even further.

She stares at the angel

she has drawn on the ceiling.

Wings the size of the angel’s torso

feathered in gold. The angel’s legs

bent, pressed against her chest,

long hair in ringlets covering her breasts

and falling gently on to her knees,

her eyes sorrowful, mouth locked

in a half smile. The angel neither chants

nor asks her to roll over.

The momentum of silence

after the knock on the door

is stunningly loud

extending longer than knuckles to wood,

the air pulsing with nothing

but a hard silent beat.

Some believe the comatose can hear.

I don’t hum sweet Jesus to my mom

because God’s son is just that, a son.

I haven’t told her enough that I loved her,

the love fitting into the mouth of a pelican,

some sloshing over onto her feet.

I notice she will die with her toenails

painted cranberry red.

As her eldest, it was my decision to stop the oxygen.

Since then, I have seen countless sun rises

and bought a puppy named Annie.

Marie is her middle name.