November 26,2027
After my mother’s parents passed away,
She said, “I am an orphan now.”
And that thought sticks with me in my grief.
Now that my own parents have passed,
I feel more alone than I have ever been.
Life has always felt complicated for me,
My mother would help me make sense of it,
My father gave me something to stand against.
And I don’t know how to feel,
And I don’t know what to say.
I can’t even cry right now; it’s bottled within me,
My parents dying – something dying inside me.
So I burn a stick of incense, letting the smoke rise,
The sandalwood, no longer annoying,
It’s a bit of solace, this act of responsible respect.
It gives me something to do and a moment to remember.
When Mama died, I wrote two poems to help me make sense of it. Since Papa’s passing, I haven’t had the guts to confront it in poetry. Tonight I wrote two, one about Papa and one about Mama and Papa, and I am realizing I still have a lot to process. I suspect that it will be like this for a while. I think I am going to lose the computer and watch some TV for a while.