POETRY
It Could Happen
In the spring, I could die of natural causes under the lilac bush with hummingbirds darting about.
My heart could stop when I linger a moment by Karl’s roses or near the Japanese Snowbells to inhale their fragrance.
If I get dementia, I could wander into the woods, slip on a mossy rock and die from exposure [to the delight of thousands of beetles and worms.]
I could die from shock or fright. [Highly likely.]
If I fall and hit my head tying shiny flags onto the fig tree to keep the Jays away, I could take my last breath lying in the dirt wondering why the California poppy seeds never sprouted.
If I am mortally wounded in a crash, before I closed my eyes for the last time, I could look at a print of Lamentation [The Mourning of Christ] by Giotto I keep folded in a pocket for just such an occasion.
I could get some incurable illness and fade away in silence or scream in agony strapped to a bed until the end, like Aunt Opal.
Someone, not me, could shoot me through the heart. [Once I did peruse the guns at Skye’s but changed my mind.]
My house could catch fire and I could die from smoke inhalation trying to save my dog. Toby would die in my arms. He would sneak me into heaven with him.
The brakes could fail going down Eighth Street hill. My car could careen into the river where I would drown in the cold dark water with fishes swimming merrily by as though nothing were amiss.
When I stop in Hammond to take a picture of a bull elk, like some clueless tourista, he could gore me to death, a spike of his antler piercing my eye, smashing though my brain [like that guy I saw on Facebook], causing me to flail wildly in death throes like a hooked fish. [Yikes!].
The expansive vista at Ecola State Park could make me dizzy. I could fall thirty feet off the cliff onto the beach where Search and Rescue could not get to me.
I could have a fatal brain hemorrhage by the birdbath out front — the one with Sartre’s Being and Nothingness I put there a few years ago for the birds to read as a joke.
Outside the Senior Center, Betty could back over me. [She almost did last week.]
I could die laughing while looking at The Resurrection by Piero della Francesca, the resurrected Christ rising in Glory while the Roman guards slept. “You snooze, you lose.” [LOL]
Bringing to mind the breathless summer afternoon sitting next to Cait and Liam on their front steps when I felt the Universal Pulse, time stopped, rapt in the Perfect my death would be inconsequential.
Lost in the vision of my little sister unable to rise from her bed in hospice, smiling at me, her last words, “Mar, we’re two old kippers in a box,” I could expire from pathos.
I could look up into the heavens one morning, see the face of Father Lance filled with compassion, hear his welcoming words, “Come. Fear not,” and surrender. [He’s been looking after my sister until I can get there.]
When my dad’s heart failed, the beat slowed, his blood pressure dropped, I could have lain down next to him and begged to leave with him, or I could have drifted away into nothing at the foot of the bed when Eric was on life support, or succumbed to grief when Robin screamed, “Get out of my house!” Actually, I could have died from sadness over all the others who I loved but who did not love me back. [Or maybe they did and, like Father Headly said, the Enduring Enigma is we hurt each other anyway.]
I could collapse from a massive stroke while gazing into the sky watching brave Jack the Crow fight off a huge raptor to protect the chicks in the nest because Olga can’t do it by herself.
Even decades after the first time failed in the LeBagh Woods that cold afternoon in late Autumn, another one of Henry’s schemes to murder me could still succeed. [That’s why I covered the windows, changed the locks and made an escape plan — take the North passage that leads from the dining room to the kitchen, grab the cash out of the Emergency Money Teapot, out the back door, down the steps, along the West side of the house, through the neighbor’s driveway to my car. I keep it gassed-up.]
There could be a supernova and I could be burnt to a crisp with all my stuff, and the rest of humanity, and all the animals and plants, and all the people I love and don’t love.
In my mind’s ear, I could hear Eric’s perfect note that evening during a concert in Longview, or I could hear three-year-old Robin say, “Mama, I don’t want you to be throwed away” and just fall over dead, my maternal heart burst, love and joy spilling out.
I could rot away from guilt and shame like that door in the Ivan Albright painting, Everything I Should Have Done I Did Not Do.
A crazy person hiding in the women’s bathroom at the rest area on highway 26 might slit my jugular. [It happened to someone else in some other rest area.]
I could freeze to death with Dale in his cabin in Alaska where he tries to hide from the combat nightmares. His suffering no embrace could heal, though I’d try. [I’d finally know the two angels who visited me when I was five were us!]
After I read my bonjour tristesse poem to Vince and couldn’t stop sobbing, he said people really do die from a broken heart. [He wanted me to get it published, but I lost it.]
A man could kill me. They’ve tried before. Beat me to death, maybe, or rape me and then strangle me so I won’t tell. [Fast-talk wouldn’t save me.]
The night I saw my soul hovering over me in a glowing dimensional ellipse, I thought I was dying but it was just one of those hallucinations I had during withdrawal, like the almost mouse scampering across the vestibule floor, the kind old Native woman with saucer eyes or the firefly that smiled. [There are no fireflies in Oregon.]
The cougar spotted on Fourth Street could stalk me on my way to the mailbox, pounce and tear out my throat before I knew what hit me.
Stumbling over some junk on the floor, I could fall. Unable to get up I’d expire from dehydration or hypothermia, like Aunt Jessie.
I could even pass away in my sleep enthralled while waltzing through a dreamy vision of the millions of the luminous threads connecting all living things.
I don’t want to croak in a small room with pale green walls, machines beeping and an IV delivering saline at the bend in my elbow. Though, if I do, the colors and the sounds will probably transcend the ordinary, ascend into the sublime and I’d pass-on in a reverie certain my mom loved me. [And, if not, it didn’t matter. I was loved.]
Martha Ellen lives alone in an old Victorian house on a hill on the Oregon coast. Retired social worker. History of social justice activism. MFA. Poems and prose published in various journals and online forums.
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Image: Lamentation [The Mourning of Christ] by Giotto. Public domain.
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