- it's may today, that special warmth that is more brightness from the sun and less actual heat
- on this rainy monday morning, parents walk their kids to school in tiny yellow rain jackets
- the night before, i stayed over on the bottom bunk of my baby sister's bed beside an orange cat, fell asleep to the sound of her overhead, laughing quietly as she read calvin & hobbes to herself
- my dad says that by the time my baby sister was born, he was too old to get up in the middle of the night when she needed rocking to comfort her
- my dad changed diapers instead
- my dad says he doesn't think my baby sister needs to see my grandma like this. she's too young and my grandma is suffering too much and all we are is witnesses to her pain
- the nurse tells my grandma, whenever she says the pain is too much, that she is a strong woman. my grandma begs for my dad to help her
- there is a quiet gentleness to how my dad needs us. it means sitting beside him beside my grandma's hospital bed, watching him try to explain what people from black and white photos may have meant, who these figures were to my grandma
- when my grandmother dies, my older brother shows up at my mom's house at midnight, crying, on his way home from the bar, and she holds him
- sometimes, you need your mother even when you're 24
- my mom says that when my older brother's appendix got infected in eighth grade and he was in the hospital for two weeks, my dad was the one who stayed with him every night
- getting a cremation appointment takes nearly a month, and in the meantime my father gets into fights with my aunts and uncles over my grandmother's will
- my grandma had a dog; who will look after her dog?
- on the phone with my uncle, my dad bursts out laughing. he says ken reminded him not to put their mother next to eileen in the family plot. he says she hated eileen
- my older brother cries because one day we'll have to look after our parents too. i remember how my dad ran the boston marathon the year it was bombed, how he finished before the bomb went off
- we can be lucky in moments of pain
- on sunny evenings in may, parents will pull their kids through toronto in wagons, the way my parents used to pull me, the way i hope to pull my own children one day as my father walks beside me
- in her hospital bed, my skin and bones grandma opens her eyes and looks over at me and my father, morphine running through her veins, cracked lips open and tells me, "you have a beautiful smile."
may 3 2017 ∞
aug 2 2017 +
