20150617 (Lake Tahoe)

The ski lift at Heavenly, a posh hotel at Lake Tahoe, where Peter might have worked after getting out of prison had the economy not crashed and had he not have to wear forever the name felon.

Two years on I still don’t know

What to think of Peter’s death

In every instance I have felt

Lesser loss than those about me 

More happiness that torments had ended 

My dad died of recurring colon cancer 

At a hospital unattended in the night

We were assured he was unconscious

And by comparison to others felt no pain

Only in the movies are you there at the last breath

Even if you’re at their side, you could 

Sleep through it as if you’d been at home

Then what, regret you’d come at all

My mom left similarly a stroke another stroke

A final stroke that took her life

Jean died, I really think, when I held her 

In my arms and the clot hit her brain

But I was also there to click the switch

That meant goodbye, this pseudo-life

Will soon end, as it did

As we all stood around. The doctors

Said she felt no pain there was no hope

Too much had died. You’d rather she

Awake to thirty days of suffering

Would that be comfort to your soul

I’d said goodbye all through that week

I stayed the night within her room

And told her the only truth to tell

When she asked Am I dying Yes

The sense of loss came later after 

Those weird times so like Orpheus

And Eurydice that I would think

She is behind me now but if I look

She’ll disappear and one dream

Of her happy in heaven still loving us

I didn’t cry for months then but

Fourteen years later I tear up now

In a sense thank God she didn’t have to handle

Peter’s dying the way he did. 

Not that he didn’t give her grief

Enough when both were alive

When we thought he was in school

And was drunk in a creek

When he was dressing weed for sale 

With a friend the attic bedrooms

Thick with smoke. A stolen gun stashed

In the shed behind the garage. My car destroyed

In a store window crash at Cedar and Lee

The theft of another child’s trumpet

And burnt matches strewn near his bed

Covered with bugs he slept in a wreck parked

At the corner lot of the Christian Science church 

Broke into the house when we were away

Cereal spilled mysteriously and blankets gone

She’d seen him shake from the violent

Wretching of automotive anti-freeze

His mouth stained with the green tint

She’d seen him wrestled to the ER floor 

As we pressed for his psychiatric admission

How had he done in Lake Tahoe

Could I believe the letters he sent 

Of  having a job and doing it well 

Entertaining guests at a hotel

I didn’t visit he didn’t return

Wrote only occasionally we spoke

Even less. His last call my ex said

He was so happy he’d been given

A license for medical marijuana

The best I could cobble together was 

His job was trashed in the crash 

Of 2008. Depressed he wandered again

Burned down the cabin trying to kill himself

Pleaded guilty and spent four years in prison

I wrote him monthly. He wrote back each time

California prisons overstuffed did a lousy job

Of release. Back in the desert again no job

No friends on the night before Father’s Day

Out of meds out of money 

He walked to the wilderness

Fixed his belt to a branch and his neck

And ended his agony

A handsome strong young man

Who though he had come through the thicket

Of life he never overcame being rejected at birth.

Nothing we did healed that cut 

It was in his mirror in his watch on his clothes

Shadowed every thing he did never went away

Every parent knows a million things

Could have been done better

You don’t get to do over

You must face what happened

In sorrow and give it to God

Still for so many days

You will cry for the loss

c. J.S.Manista, 2015