Where You are, You will Come Again (For Jack, For Corrie and poetry excerpt)

There comes a time when we stare death in the face.

It is not pretty. It is not for someone to blame.

The biggest tragedy is that some people see Death more often than others.

I’ve confronted it and questioned with experiences going back a decade. Two months to the day of Corrie’s sudden death, my family had to make a difficult decision.

The following excerpt is from a poem on which I’m still working called “On the Day Death Came.”

Death smiled when she
said, “Where you are
you will come again”
when a stretcher passed
by with a body too short
to fill out its length
covered in a white sheet.
Death said, “I will guide the
best from this place where
metal crashes into metal
and disease makes statistics
of people without their names
upon a grave.” I stared at
the body covered in white
on the stretcher as gray clouds
looked like floating drapes
blown by wind through a
window broken by teens
who took a dare to get in a
house abandoned
for twenty years.
How should I paint Death
when there were those who
have seen her more than me
when she said, “I could not
block the child from the
mortar shell soldiers sent
this way.” Some eyes saw too
much in desert sands, or in
neighborhoods people who
wore business suits
never called “neighborhoods.”
excerpt from “on the day death came”

Sometimes we’re given time to catch our breath after a tragedy, such as losing a child.

Sometimes we’re not.

Sometimes our summer is made to be our winter.

Last Thursday, one of my family’s two puppies, Jack, was hit by a car. The person who hit him left Jack for dead.

It easy to argue in the country: “Well, I was worried about that,” or “You let your puppies out.”

I had worked on training my puppies to know the property, and where to go and not to go. Overall, they did a great job.

Almost two months after the death of my daughter, the puppy I picked out, Jack, was hit by a car. He was still alive, and we took him to our family vet. Then we took him to a specialist.

The injuries he sustained would make his life miserable, and beyond what we can afford to fix. My husband and I made the difficult decision this morning to put Jack to sleep. The vet surgeon agreed with this decision.

Jack was the puppy with the Boxer face I’d always wanted.

He was a wonderful puppy full of nothing but love.