I contemplate the circular black standing Lasko fan’s whirring propeller jjjzjzjzjjjng as it vacillates toward my lavender louvre doors and back towards the open window where the Russian olives screen the clouds and periwinkle sky.  I’m half reclined in bed, bolstered by three fat pillows against the headboard, another between my thighs to keep my hip from rotating inward, yellow smiley hospital socks on my agitated feet while vancomycin drips from the plastic grenade of antibiotics at my side through the long slender catheter of my PICC line,  At my bedside table, my purple glitter journal, ripped at the right corner,  a Lamy fountain pen and a pack of blue-black cartridges, the small jar of cannabis-infused coconut oil, a glass of cold water form the fridge in a Goodwill glass marked with lemon slice icons.  On my iPhone, I upload my niece’s 75-minute flow posted on her website The Honest Blonde, I follow her guidance,  pressing my thumb and left finger to my nose, breathing with her in pranayama.  Mirroring her, I place my hand over my heart where the PICC’s distal tip enters my vena cava, and I imagine the antibiotic seeping in to the left chamber of oxygen rich blood and through my arteries, delivering the dose to my cells. I visualize this twice a day for the hour and a half I’m hooked up to my home intravenous treatment, a sort of Fantastic Voyage of chemicals attacking the purple pompom bacteria consuming my bone. Though I want to lift my arms, like Liv, above my head to sweep the energy towards the ceiling of this small room where I’ve spent the last months, I can’t compromise the deep needle in my brachial vein.

So I  lie back and watch with great tenderness her standing poses, dancer’s arms and legs elongated, as she flows on, this lithe young woman, muscular and flexible.  By the time she is through,  all soft angles and strength, my grenade is empty, a miniature deflated football.  At the end of her practice—at the end of my treatment—she lies in savasana on her yoga mat; I lie supine on the bed’s down duvet: both of us contemplating life from corpse poses.  In Medellin, Columbia, she is inhaling the elix’ir of tropical oxygen rich air.   I am inhaling the whirring air from the floor fan as tonight’s killing cocktail mixes in my veins.

When Ebrahim comes into the room with the two syringes–the saline and the heparin–to flush the line after the antibiotics and screw on the little sterile green cap that protects the port hanging from my upper arm, I reach for hope but feel submerged in despair.  Housebound and trapped:  nowhere to go but from kitchen to bathroom to bedroom rolling an old lady walker.

In this state, I turn to lectio divina:  not unlike yoga, a spiritual solace.  From The Illustrated Rumi, I transcribe a poem in my journal and sit quietly, allowing the words to seep into my veins as irrevocably as the drug.  In contemplation, a soft tingle slides across my skin; I recognize gratitude and my husband comes into focus,  He has cared for me since the accident through the first two surgeries.  Not only these past months but in our twenty-four years together, Ebrahim’s steadfastness and loyalty have never wavered. I record the Rumi poem and pull digital images from our 2017 travel to Portugal.

In one-minute bride,  images from Ereciera and a narrative poem by rumi are accompanied by the iconic wedding walk of Pachelbel Canon express gratitude for the gift of both human and divine love.

It’s the Saturday after Thanksgiving. here where I work at the large scarred wooden table and quiet but for the occasional beat of heels on the scratched parquet floor.  Faint odor of unwashed skin wafts over.  At the table across from me, a bearded ponytailed man wearing a red and navy plaid wool shirt is embroidering a black and white study, intent on his needle and yellow embroidery hoop.

I come here for solace and space away from the sanctuary of my lovely home. I’ve just ended a six-week local writing course. I wrote fluently and fast in rushes based on prompts from the poet facilitator who led the small group of seven women every Monday evening.  Still probing my writing process on themes of love and loss, condensing those expansive raw narratives to tightly edited three-minute multimedia works.  Here is the seventeenth story I’ve posted since November, 2016, when I began exploring the digital story form.

In drift, photos and images from a balloon ride in Jo’burg and the Balloon Festival in Albuquerque are juxtaposed in digital space accompanied by devotional music and my narrative voice to remember my brother-in-law Bobby who passed away five years ago.

Boo has always let me go.  Not as in giving me permission, but in understanding I needed to take solo journeys throughout our twenty years of marriage. Since I was a young adult, my instinct has been to leave, travel, journey, sojourn as both proactive actions in the need for change and reactive reactions to crisis: Mali, Togo, Benin, Bali, Romania, Hungary, France.    After my father died in early 2016, I left for India as an English Language Specialist for two-months work with underprivileged high school girls.  Returning from the intensity of Kolkata to Boulder and our three-floor townhome, I simply couldn’t move back in.  I’d traveled too far and spent too long away.  I wanted to move on.

Boo and I took a long road trip through Southwestern Colorado that summer, looking for land. Nowhere I wanted to settle down.  Back in Boulder, crying jags until two am, Boo figured I needed to pack.

For me, packing is an antidote to grief and loss, to uncertainty, to the unknown direction of destiny.  Emptying our townhome of twenty years gave me a sense of purpose, even though I didn’t know then where we were going to go.   Giving away and letting go.   I pared down my wardrobe, gave away designer fashion to my niece.  I culled shelves of books saved from my Masters in Literature forty years ago, rereading Voltaire and Flaubert before donating all to the public library. I saved what held memory:  my collections of textiles and jewelry from thirty years of travel.

When the upstairs packing was finished–art wrapped, clothes in wardrobe boxes,  Persian rugs rolled with mothballs into sheets — I made giant X’s across the cleared closets and drawers with blue masking tape, not be opened again.   We rented an 8xl0 storage unit and filled it from floor to ceiling with labeled bins:  Ski Gear; Champagne Flutes; Jode’s Shoes.

Boo sold the furniture on ebay: the chaise couch, the solid oak dining room table and Italian leather chairs, the designer suede butterfly chairs.

Finally, he disassembled the contemporary bed I’ve always loved—and decided to keep– and moved it  from the upstairs bedroom to the empty living room.  It was as if we had just arrived at a s B&B, like a beautiful studio apartment, basic necessities in the kitchen and the French doors open to the shady patio where I’d planted pots with flowers. We ate on the wooden floor on a kilim, used up all the canned goods, thawed frozen food, and drank the leftover liquor in the cabinet.  I loved the spaciousness, the feeling of transience, the sense of anonymity living in my own empty home.

In December, a cottage came up for rent in Chapel Hill, one of the destinations we’d considered moving to, and another contract in India synchronistically came up for me.  We rented the townhome, packed the Mitsubishi and drove east.  I settled Boo into the 400 square foot tiny house and on New Year’s Day, 2017, flew back to Boulder as my home of record, picked up my luggage, and boarded a flight for  Bangalore for a four-month curriculum development project.   Ahhh.  International airport lounges on the ground and familiarity in the air.

At the Indian Institute of Journalism and New Media, after the academic day, I made digital stories again, collaborating with journalism photography students:  pongal, hobli, madrasa.   I traveled for a month in France, another in Colorado, returning to Chapel Hill in July for a layover.  I wanted to keep going, and we did, traveling in Portugal from Ereceira to Porto and Avora, from Lula back to Lisbon.   By November, I was again on a long distance flight:  Mongolia via Beijing for an intensive two months of training across that grand land.  I had hotel reservations in Beijing for after the contract, two weeks yoga training reserved in Bali, and a train ticket to Tibet.

Arriving and leaving, laying over, checking in and checking out:  this is what I’m very good at.

It must have been an Archangel who knocked me down at dusk on that sub-zero Ulaanbaatar icy sidewalk, a dear friend said.  Otherwise, how would I have slowed my momentum?

After hip surgery in Seoul, in hospital for two weeks,  I reflected on doing a hundred mph.   Back in the US, we took our time to drive the 3,000 miles across the US, most household stuff left behind in that rental, the Mitsubishi packed with Boo’s tools and a couple suitcases,  nights in Marriotts across Florida, Tennessee, Missouri, Texas. At the border of New Mexico, I said honey, I think I need to stop.  My husband looked at me that way he has, as if he hadn’t told me so over Skype in Bangalore, in Delhi, in Ulaanbaatar, as if I hadn’t already promised him a hundred times.

I sought a place to recover, not only my mobility and strength, but a Self I’d maybe left somewhere, on the torn leather seat of a pedicab in India or maybe under the bench in a Mongolian ger.

Reaching Santa Fe, I said let’s move here.  We rented an apartment that day, drove on to Boulder to pack up a U-Haul and drove back to move in, another way station, another layover.  Boo set up our bed, the only piece of furniture we owned.  I unpacked cooking supplies, sheets and towels.  We were squatting again, short term, transients.

And then, in February,  Boo found us a house, the story in the blog demo posted on 3/13/2018.

In four months, he gutted and remodeled 945 square feet.  Inspired by an article my niece Livia posted in the Rob Report on the concept of EcoMod, we recycled, upcycled and repurposed everything we could. Restore—for Habitat for Humanity—took what we couldn’t use.  We bought repurposed materials: MDF board and eco-brand primer.  Boo painted the walls, trimmed all the doors, put in new windows.  Neither a kitchen planner nor new designer cupboards: a local contractor going out of business sold us a load of cabinets from a job site.  Boo retrofitted not only the kitchen but the bathrooms, the guest room and made built-ins for the living room.

In May, RELO emailed.  An opportunity out of state.

Stay with me, Boo said.

He reassembled our bed and I unpacked all the bins:  my textiles, framed posters, the crystal and dishes.  I filled the cupboards, stocked the pantry.  I made custom cushions and pillows from Indonesian ikat for the living room benches.  The bed –with pillows from Tailand,  Tajikistan and Togo–fills the small bedroom.  An applique bull from Mali hangs over it in a Southwestern frame.  My winter and summer wardrobes fit into one closet. The second bedroom is to be a  guest room with Thai temple rubbings and a Persian garden silk rug on the floor.  Boo’s tools occupy the garage.  Our home is eclectic:  everything we brought seems to have found its place.

And though it feels as if this lovely casita is not really my own, as if Boo and I are spending the year in another space that is not yet home, it seems I too have found a place to belong for awhile.

In gut, still and video images combined with ragtime document the six-month remodel Boo completed at 512 Camino de Guadalupita in Santa Fe.

On the first anniversary of my father’s death, I dream I telephone him.

“Hello,” my Dad says on the other end of the line, the “o” melodic, soft and sultry, an invitation. It’s his lady voice. After Mom died, he started looking, hosting the girls from the garden club, inviting a forty-year old from the investment seminar, flirting with singles on the golf course.  Then, at eighty-nine, he joined Match.com.   

I ask him if anyone is winking at him.

He says he gets lots of winks, joking.  Then his tone shifts.  “Where are you? I’ve been calling. I want to go see the stone.”

So I go over there to where he lives. I pull the Mitsubishi into his cul de sac, Greg’s truck is not parked in front of the dusty green clapboard house he bought when Mom couldn’t manage the stairs anymore in the big house. I don’t like to go in when the new roommate is there, the guy who rents my Mom’s room.

I get out of the car.  Dad is not in the garage at his workbench.  I check around the side where he’s layering leaves, manure, and dirt in two six-foot bins.  It smells like shit. 

I walk around to the shed he built behind the garage to store his lawnmower, electric edger, aerator, cultivator and fertilizer.  He’s on his knees in the dirt, transplanting strawberries in the garden he plowed out of the backyard lawn.  He looks up at me, says, “Hell, they’re not doin’ too good.  I put five years of my life into this soil. It’s just getting to where it is producing but, well . . .” He sits back on his heels and shrugs.  “I thought I would die here. You never know what life has in store.” 

Greg has made an offer, and Dad’s selling the house. 

He goes on all fours and puts a knee forward.  I offer my hand.  “I can do it,” he says, and pushes up with his left, holding on to the fence slat with his right. He pulls himself to vertical, leans on to the wooden handle of the shovel he’s used for forty years, and shakes his head.  “Getting too damn old,” he says.  He’s chin is grizzled and he’s jowly, his nose a sharp angle.  His eyes are brown, bright.  His khakis are muddy. I suggest he change them.

“We’re going to a graveyard,” he says, like I’ve inherited dementia. I don’t argue.

He walks ahead of me, looking down at his socks, feet slipping in the rubber garden sandals. At the car he opens the door, puts his backside in first, holding on to the roof for support, and jack knifes his legs inside.   

I get into the driver’s seat, ask if he wants to stop, get flowers.  He raises his eyebrows, says no. He just wants to see the stone

“It’s a pilgrimage,” I say.

 “What the hell are you talking about?” he says.

“You know, you go to the grave, you know, remember Mom,” I stammer.

He says he stopped by a week ago.  I’m surprised. I thought he’d left her behind when he’d started dating again.

On the highway, we don’t talk. I turn into the church parking lot. Dad gets out of the car, putting one foot then the other on the ground, leveraging himself out with the doorframe. He heads down the walkway, not looking back, past the dead baby cremariums, steps off the sidewalk at the life-sized white Jesus hanging on a crucifix, and shambles between headstones to the plot near the marble bench, that slab dedicated to someone’s brother and son under the big tree.

It’s been six months since Mom died, took that long to decide on the flat basic gravestone: dark granite border, light granite face. It’s been engraved, the script simple and elegant like he used to write when I was a kid and he calligraphed my name into my missal.   New dirt surrounds the stone, lawnlip edged sharp.  Dad’s grey socked toes are sooty against the green grass.

Mary Brexa.  Born January 6, 1917.  Died November 2, 2005.

The early spring morning light filters through the branches of the cottonwood.  A robin alights on a branch above, warbles, drops wet white guano onto a fat tree root.

Joseph Brexa.

His urn will be put into the same plot.  At St. Mary’s, it’s one body per grave, but two-in-one for the urns. Though my Mom had wanted hers to be buried, my Dad had convinced her to be cremated. Once the priest had said it was OK with the Pope, she’d agreed, but by then, her dementia had set it and she’d been accommodating to most everything.

Born September 1, 1919. 

“Hell, now everyone in town will know how old I am.” 

I find a green leaf shaped like a heart, reach down and press it over the year.  “See, you can just epoxy it onto the granite,” I say.  “No one will know.”

Between my mother’s and father’s names is etched a pair of interlocked rings with the date of their wedding engraved in the middle.  1954.  A year before I was born. 

“She didn’t want to marry me,” my Dad says, lightness in his voice again, “but I hounded her, took her to nice places, and you know, she appreciated it. She never wanted the best, she was just happy to have enough.”  He stubs the edge of the stone.  “We had a lot of fun together.”  Then he gets the look of a junkyard dog finding a bone under a moth-eaten pillow. “Oh, we did so much necking,” he says. 

In the distance there’s the hum of a mower; around us the sweet perfume of cut grass.

He shrugs his shoulders.  “Oh well, there it is.” 

I take my father’s hand. His palm is rough and already I feel the tremors. He drops mine, turns to go, his head down, shuffling feet in those rubber shoes. 

I bend down and trace my mother’s name with my fingertips, say a Hail Mary fast, then follow my Dad back across the rows of other people’s graves.

As this month marks the year anniversary of my father’s passing, pongal’s  images, story and music from Kengeri Hobli in India invite celebration of life’s cycles.

It’s just after Christmas and Ann and I are sitting on her leather sofa in her home in Boulder, stretched out, our feet entwined, drinking red wine and pretending we’re talking to Dad.

Jode:  It’s a warm California late January afternoon when Nanz rolls you outside to sit in the sun.  At the metal threshold of the door, she lifts the back wheels and you grip the armrests tight with your long pale fingers, cry out you’re falling!   I say “Hold on” Dad, it’s OK.”   It’s the Parkinson’s: you don’t now where your body is in space. Nanz sets you facing the high late morning sun and zips you into your down jacket.  She puts on your ski hat and you say, “Thank you, Dear,” polite as ever.  I say, “You look like a Ski Patrolman, Dad.”  You sit very straight in the wheelchair. You close your eyes, tilt your face to the sunlight.  Your skin is smooth and pale. The sun is warm and I lie down on the cold concrete of the driveway at your feet, look up past the metal footrests of the chair and the toes of your baggy grey socks, your face in repose, your ski hat framed by the clear blue sky. I watch for a very long time, wondering where you are traveling. When you briefly open your eyes from the dreaming, you look down at me.  You don’t seem surprised to see me from so far above, as if you are already flying. You twiddle your fingers in a hello and close your eyes again, tilt your head again to the light.  I think you are sleeping but you open your eyes and look down, say, “What are you doing down there?”  I say, “Dad, where have you been?” You float your hands up and circle them, like snow swirling, like flakes falling up.

 Ann:  It’s a cold Ohio January winter night and I’m nine that time when you take me with you to Boston Mills. We drive through the dark night, the windshield wipers going switch critch against the ice and you roll down the window with the handle and while you’re steering, reach out with your ungloved hand and swipe at the freezing.  In the old seat next to you, the heater is blowing hot air on my face.  I have my plaid book bag and when we get to the parking area, all the lights have auras. You hide the fruit pies and the orange soda in the snow under the back wheel of the VW for after and I take my book bag on my shoulder and my skis cradled in my arms and we walk across the icy lot.  I put mine between the pegs near the Chalet and you put yours on, stepping into the bindings.  I go sit by the fire pit, do my math. Then I’m done; I go outside into the night and put the cables around the back of my boots and pole on over to Buttermilk. The T bar is so heavy and it pulls me off my feet.  I go crashing and the guy running the lift stops the whole machine and helps me up and get ready.  I look over my right shoulder.  I’m cold.  He says, “It’s coming, now, honey” and I hop up and hold on tight all the way up the iced tracks.   At the top, I slip off and the T bar goes thwang as it releases into the dark.  I can’t find you  You’re patrolling.  I ski down. At the bottom, I turn around, and go over to Tiger.  I have to tinkle bad but I ride up the Chairlift anyway.  The stars are so light and I’m holding it back and at the top when the Chairlift lefts me off, I fall down and I can’t get back up and I can’t hold it back.  I just can’t. The night is so bright, I can’t see.  The wet is freezing when you find me, you hold me tight and I wipe my face on the nylon of your red Ski Patrol jacket.  You say, “Princess, it’s OK. Let’s go down.”  And then you ski me home. 

In digital space, chairlift juxtaposes one image from multiple views with a cyclical text.  This lullaby I spoke to calm my father on his difficult nights.  This piece is for my sister Ann.

My sister Ann and I are having a glass of Malbec after the Thanksgiving holiday in Boulder, reminiscing about Dad and feeling blue about celebrating Christmas without him this year.  Beyond the French doors of her kitchen, the patio is empty, branches leafless twigs, backyard brown and dry.  Dad’s raised garden beds are barren and his seedling boxes stacked in some corner of the shed.  His wheelbarrow is tilted sideways onto a slat of fence. 

Five years ago, after Dad broke up with Micki, he moved from Florida to Ann’s in Boulder, just up the street from my townhome.  Ann gave him her youngest son’s room, vacated when he moved out.  Jack’s multicolored parrot hung from the curtain rod and the walls were painted lime green and lemon yellow.  Dad had one of the single four-posters I’d slept in as a kid, a plaid comforter, and a big screen TV on the dresser at the foot of the bed.  There was a desk and his “comp” with Internet and a rolling chair on a plastic pad.  His bedside table had a drawer full of bridge mix, chocolate covered raisins, dried pineapple slices and banana chips hard as poker chips. 

Most afternoons after teaching, I went over to visit. I’d head around back of the house to see if he was transplanting something into his garden, then check the garage where he was tinkering with some project then the shed, calling his name.  I’d head back around the front and knock and ring the doorbell and then open the door and climb the carpeted stairs to his room.  He might be stretched out watching Walker Texas Ranger! at the highest volume. He’d turn and say Hiiiiya! with a lilt and a grin that meant he was glad to see me and then fumble with the control to power down the sound.  In his leather desk chair, I’d roll over to the bed  and plump up a pillow so he could sit up and we’d talk.  A lot. About everything.  I’d entertain him about the kids at high school and then he’d ask about my upcoming contract and we’d meander to some question I had about magnetism and the next thing we’d be googling it and I’d read aloud about how it worked exactly.  More than once I’d come the next day and find some invention, like a battery he’d made from copper cable and a sewing spool with a toothpick that went platta platta platta when he connected the circuit. 

After two years in Boulder, Dad decided to move to California. I didn’t want him to go—he had his garden, bridge at the Senior Center, putting and chipping at Flatirons, family dinners, weekly Communion—but in the mega retirement community with which my youngest sister enticed him—golf course! contract bridge! six clubhouses!–he imagined he’d find another gal.  I wasn’t one to step in his way. It was my point of view that as long as my father had all this marbles, he should play his own game.  Once again, I helped him pack, this time just a suitcase with his clothes and a blue zip shoulder bag with snacks for the flight.  I drove him to DIA the day he flew out, checked him in at the counter where Ann had reserved a wheelchair to make it easier for him to get through security. I had a pass and wheeled him to the concourse, his cane across his lap, leaning down to smell his wispy shampooed hair, his spiced cologne.

At the gate, he pushed up out of the wheelchair by himself and I handed him  his cane. I escorted him down the walkway.  When the stewardess greeted him, he stepped over the lip at the entrance to the plane and didn’t look back. 

I learned Digital Storytelling with StoryCenter at a Stonebridge Farm workshop in Lyons that summer.  Shared here, my first digital piece loam with multiple kinds of imagery–scanned prints from my father’s life, images taken at the farm during the workshop, photos in Ann’s backyard, appropriated photos from my millennial niece’s trip to London, and short video–juxtaposed with text remembering my Dad. 

Three weeks after my father dies, I travel to India on a pre-arranged contract to facilitate an English intensive camp for high school girls.   So soon after death,  my grief colors Kolkata disconsolate.  In the late afternoon, honking yellow taxis ply the road, horns punctuating street cacophony. Sugarcane presses, coconut vendors, bel puri stands, beggars, and second hand booksellers throttle the uneven pavement land-mined with dog leavings. Young women, hair pulled back in long braided tails, wearing multicolored shalwar kameez and flat sandals link arms. Young men–shirts tucked into black pants–port bulging backpacks and stride purposefully to and from business, weaving around feral dogs that curl in slumber in the middle of moving throng. A man in a loin wrap stretches out sleeping on a cement bench; behind him, a curtain strung on a rope shields the family living there, cook stove pressed against a fence surrounding the bank where security guards in navy blue serge uniforms sit in folding chairs, mopping their brows.  On the corner, a child lies face down, legs spread on the dusty bricks: a mother with a baby in her arms holds out a tin bowl.

As evening drops onto the city, particulate auras the sun.  Sparrows make lunatic noise; the crows’ baritone like a saw against metal. In the darkening street maze of smog and exhaust, I venture in the direction I think I stay, double back, tripping over concrete, headlights in my face. Passing a flaming altar, I watch the burning of a hundred candles, pedestrians stopped in prayer, but I cannot approach.  Against the night, I shut the curtains of my room, incarcerated in the privilege of isolation, shaking some nights with tremors like those that quake the hotel in the aftershock of a 6.5 Myanmar earthquake, The concrete bridge two kilometers from my lodging collapses.  Other people die.  One weekend after my contract, I take a local overnight train twelve hours to Varanasi seeking solace in the mythos of the sacred Ganges.  For two days I stay sheltered in a small room with a view of the ghats where Hindu priests trailing white garments burn bodies to ash on the fetid banks.  I spend there remembering those who are gone: Dad, Angus, Vusi, Will.  On the third morning, I am called to the river.

ghat explores how unedited images photographed at dawn juxtaposed with a closely edited text evokes meaning out of a simple human act of love. 

I stayed with my father during his last six weeks, sleeping on the floor in the sad rental in Laguna Woods he’d relocated to at ninety-three, imagining he would do everything the Southern Cal retirement megaplace offered until the end of his life:  date women, golf, play bridge.  In the woodshop, he’d made beautiful mosaic cutting boards and played ping pong in the community center for a couple years, driving around in a golf cart until he fell on the linoleum last summer and decided he no longer wanted to live a compromised lifestyle. 

While I was there, he had a full-time caregiver for his personal needs:  my work was witness and conversation, sitting by the hospice-provided hospital bed in his darkened room, listening to the rhythmic uff-shhh uff-shhh of the oxygen machine. When he woke in the morning or in the middle of the night, I’d lean over and say, “Are you back, Dad?”  From the other side, I meant, the unconscious dreamscape he explored for fourteen, then eighteen, then twenty hours a day. “I guess so,” he’d say, coherent, asking for dentures he’d worn for sixty years, stretching his parched lips over the pink ridged trough that no longer fit his shrunken mouth. He’d maneuver them in, hands cupped as if playing a harmonica.  He had things he wanted say before he went away, that he would leave us money he’d saved since he was a child in Czechoslovakia hiding a tin of coins in the attic corner. 

On weekends, my niece Livia drove eighty miles up the Pacific Coast highway from Malibu to visit.  She’d come in the front door, and my father would awaken out of the twilight zone of codeine and morphine when she breezed in smelling of jasmine, cannabis and mint, bending down to kiss his grizzled cheek. She called him Grampy: he called her Doll.  She knew where he kept his secret stashes:  old lemon drops in his bedside drawer, stale black licorice hardened to twigs under his socks, gummy cellophane wrapped Nutter Butters in the back of a kitchen cupboard: she brought him fresh, soft Crispy Cremes and he’d say he wanted a taste.  He never did lose that desire for sugar, though he’d lost sixty-five pounds in six months, intentionally limiting his calories week by week in his desire to die. He vacillated, of course, some mornings wanting a waffle or a pancake, though he’d gum only a bite or two of Kroger maple syrup-soaked dough before pushing the plate away and slowly shaking his head, as if the eventual loss of his appetite was a punishment worse than death. 

He’d always loved to eat, a kid who never got enough, the food locker padlocked at night in his stepmother’s home. Trusted to go for weekly groceries to the local shop where charges were written down in a book and settled at the end of the month, he accumulated private stock. He bought ten cent cherry pies, put them in a paper bag to hide in a lumber box under the front porch.  She never found out.

Days after his passing, my two sisters and I pulled a couple dozen cardboard boxes from the apartment’s closets to stack on the porch, not much stuff saved from a lifespan of ninety-six years.  I’d helped my Dad relocate five times in the previous decade and he’d off loaded each move.  Of what was left, his grandchildren had their pick. I stuck five yellow sticky notes–a name on each–to the dingy living room wall so they could stash the things they wanted, possessions reflective of their late teens’ andtwenties’ identities—Allie his golf shirts and WWII photos, Maddie an antique pen, Ben his clubs, Jack his tackle box, Liv his worn leather gloves. 

After we’d returned to our own lives in separate cities, Liv posted a story on her blog and emailed me a photo of the things she’d picked: I composed a poem back to her. This piece explores how one unedited image and a text juxtaposed in shared digital space may evoke memory and emotion cached in the heart.

While my Dad sleeps, I do yoga in his lamplit room, background sound the steady labor of his oxygen machine. Six feet tall in black, standing in tadasana, I could be the Dark Angel. If he opened his eyes and peered over the cliffedge of his mattress, maybe that Alligator in chataranga dandasana on his dark blue rug.  For weeks, at the foot of his bed, I’ve been attempting kakasana, my knees on my bent elbows, willing myself to lift my feet, willing myself to just let go. 

One afternoon, a priest comes from a local church Dad doesn’t attend to give him what isn’t called Extreme Unction but now Anointing of the Sick, a prelude, as it were. The young Vietnamese in a jeans jacket and a stole round his neck bends over my ninety-six year-old father who accepts the small olive oil cross thumb printed on his forehead. He looks up at the youth praying words in unintelligible English, says to him “Bless me, Father,” and takes Communion. 

After these sacraments, my Dad believes death will come quickly, easily, that God will just take him.  

The next week, needing respite from his struggle, I leave for two days.  My niece drives me down to Malibu to stay at her bungalow balanced on the edge of the Pacific. Through the morning while she is at work, I sit on her cement patio and do nothing, change positions with the sun, breathe in ocean light and the far horizon. She calls, says I should seek solace at a Franciscan place above the coast, texts me the name Serra Retreat. 

I uber to the road up and get out.  I want to take my time through the woods,  ascend the curving black asphalt on foot.  I stop to rest on a stone seat at the feet of a Virgin Mary.  Reaching the retreat grounds, I enter a quiet zone. Passing each Station of the Cross, the life-size white ceramic Jesuses remind me of Dad, all ribcage and bones. There’s a labyrinth and I take off my shoes, pace barefoot though the interconnecting paths, reach the center to face the dying afternoon sun.  Beyond, on a high point, a white marble rail guards the overlook and I go there, sit on a stone bench and make sounds like my Dad makes at night when he covers his face with pale white shaking hands, thinking he’s been forsaken. 

I get down on the gravel and kneel, spread my palms on the hard stones, support myself on my elbows. I am tottering on the edge of a cliff. I begin om, quietly first, then louder, and louder, leaning forward through the spaces of the railing into the infinite expanse of ocean and, in heart-wrenching hum, let go into my asana of crow. 

Photographed and recorded in the Chapel of St. John’s Episcopal Church, crow explores how the juxtaposition of voice, image and poem in digital space might resonate in a layered text of Faith.  For my husband, who has resigned from his job of fourteen years serving St. John’s community in Boulder, Colorado.