Last Words
The sociopathic originator of Gestalt Psychotherapy,
Fritz Perls, told a nurse,
“Don’t tell me what to do,”
and stopped breathing.
A friend told his wife,
“I love you,”
three times and dropped dead in his garden,
leaving the geraniums unplanted.
Some are clearly rehearsed:
“Noli timere” the great poet
Seamus Heaney texted his wife shortly
before he crossed Lethe.
Jim Harrison wrote the line,
“Man shits his pants and trashed God’s body,”
and slid off his chair,
pencil in hand.
“Have a great flight,” a friend’s mother
told her, but died before she landed.
My mother had no last words. Her brain stopped
working years before she died. She slipped out
of this veil of torn promises as quietly as a burglar
leaving through a midnight window.
You never know what your last words might be.
Should death grab you in medias res they could
be as mundane as,
turn the channel
it’s cold in here
or
I only eat the frosting.
Even on your death bed the reaper might move
too swiftly to leave you much thought.
Help! might be a last utterance
or
I’m falling through the sky.
Most likely, for me, if I have time
and the presence of mind,
I’ll choke out something like,
Now what?
Dasein’s Destiny
The physicists and engineers who invented the faux
modern boiler system with its labyrinthine tangle
of pipes and levers through which water radiates,
were not to blame, nor was the primitive urge of
primates to seek warmth, or the outlandish hubris of
Prometheus. It wasn’t anything Dave did. Dave, our 400-
pound plumber, who, just the day before, suffered a
concussion when a drunk hit his car on his way to church,
nor was it the fault of his assistant, Bryan, who shut off
two valves on our boiler on Friday because our whatsit tank
had a hole in it. Certainly, no one could blame my sweet
wife who turned the temperature up to 71 when I wasn’t
looking causing me to awaken from a dream in which I
was intensely negotiating with Satan. Were the lawyers
and executives who dotted the “Js” and crossed the “Xs”
to blame, even though they excluded plumbing from the
homeowner’s policy we’d paid thousands for over the years?
Strange to think that plumbing isn’t part of a home. Should
we have built an outhouse in our backyard? No, as much
as these agents of penury should find their very existence
on the planet shameful, they weren’t to blame. What about
God? Is They (to use modern parlance) at fault? If I believed,
I’d sue every church within a five-mile radius of my home.
As God’s representatives on earth, those religions should
be responsible for His, Her, Their actions. But what court would
accept my suit? And if I won, which denomination would
ante-up? No, such a legal ploy would be the very definition
of frivolity. It seems that the water billowing from our blown
radiator, seeping into our hard wood floor, turning our laundry
room into a temporary rain forest—this catastrophe is simply
Dasein, down and dirty, being in the world, toward death—
Dasein, who’s fallen and can’t get up.
Fledgling
Then to the elements be free
and fare thee well.
W. Shakespeare
I never knew I was that stupid. We’d
flown across country, from Pittsburgh
to Portland, to move Ariel, our son, into
his dorm room at Lewis and Clark College.
Turns out, everything I did or said was
the dumbest thing he’d ever seen or heard.
By mid-afternoon, this practicing psychoanalyst
wanted to ring his son’s neck. I was seething.
My sweet wife, herself a psychiatrist, reminded me
of how anxious people often place in others their
most feared feelings. It was our son, she insisted,
who felt stupid and awkward as he started his new
life so far away from home. His only recourse was
to make me feel even less sure, less secure, than he.
She was, of course, correct. She could always sense his
inner life better than me. When he was little, she would
take one look at him and say, “he has to poop.” “No,”
I’d counter, “how could you possibly tell?” Two minutes
later he’d be squirming, jumping up and down—body
language for BATHROOM NOW! My sweet wife’s
analysis carried me through the day, while my simmering
choler helped me leave our only child to his new world.
I hadn’t seen how protective was my anger until, driving
up Maple Avenue to our house, no longer his home, Satchmo
sang on the radio, “What a wonderful world.” My eyes
overflowed—extinguished my angry conflagration.
When the smoke cleared, there throbbed my heart,
weary and worried, in my empty chest.
