Return

I was reading about faith. The author

said we return to what we believed in when

we were young, but I can say with certainty I did

not believe in a god, maybe gods though—

the ones I found in the Edith Hamilton Mythology

my mother gave me when I was a kid. As for

return, the word says something about time

I don’t understand unless it’s the way I stood

at the kitchen sink washing dishes and staring

at my mother’s collection of  birds and one

brass giraffe she bought at the zoo. I wondered,

if I put away all the things she wanted me

to remember her by would I keep remembering?

Then I recalled that after she retired she loved

going to the zoo, and how one day I went

with her and we sat on a bench and she reached

into her straw bag and gave me a sandwich

and an apple. When I was a kid, there was never

enough time for just sitting on a bench, eucalyptus

rustling overhead, eating our lunch—she was too

busy just getting by. But on that bench it seemed

we could return to what we never had and have it

as we did one day in the hospital last winter

while we waited hours for a doctor to come and talk

about hospice. Then, nothing hurried, and, as if

we were on that bench again, my mother, growing

weightless, tiny, as her time was ending, told me

how, for a quarter, she’d flown high above

Long Beach in a two-seat plane eighty years before,

and how one day she’d gone to a mortuary

with a friend who worked there because she wanted

to see a body and did and found she was not afraid

of what she saw, and, though I’ve often thought

she told the same stories over and over, I’d never

heard either of these. We talked on and on,

and when I thought to thank her for the Mythology,

she asked why I liked the Greeks, and by now

I know it is because they never die, but live

unknown among us. She was quiet then, so

I asked if there was anything she wanted to know

about what was coming, and she said,

Yes, when will I die?   She knew I couldn’t answer,

but I told her again there were ways of making dying

easier, ways to prepare, and when the doctor

did come she listened, and signed the papers

though in the end I don’t know that it was easier,

just a kind of map to follow what can’t be followed

until, as I imagined it, she stepped off a cliff, the way

we do in dream, but this time she kept on falling.