11.10.2015

under a salted sky

My kid is not my kid. Dad is gone. Mom just died the other night, Alzheimer’s having wormed its way through her brain, her bones, her stamina, too. It’s four o’clock, dark and cold outside, and under a salted sky, bronze-dead leaves dance down the street far from where they dropped. I lay in bed awake spooning my sleeping child—the boy my dad never met and Mom forgot, the boy I’m not sure I know—my hand draped over his hip as he shudders in the wake of another of his brain’s storms. As he drifts off to sleep, he whimpers and shivers like a cold pup in my arms. I fear he’ll rouse to another one, and if he does I wonder if it will be the one that doesn’t stop. Will this misery ever go?

Photo by Michael Kolster

2 comments:

  1. For years I lived with the fear that my daughter would just die one day because the doctors couldn't figure out what was wrong with her. Thankfully she is healthy. But you live with the well known facts that children die from seizures. I can only imagine how hard that must be and I'm sorry. It wears a soul down. Take care woman.

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  2. Christy, I'm so sorry. The reality of the relentlessness is so overwhelming. My heart is with you.

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