All the windows are blindless & open
in the room where my grandmother
lies dying, for weeks now. Dying &
dying despite our exhaustion. Think me
cruel but think, too, creator of eggshells.
Think: purveyor of offenses. See also:
air pressure moments before a storm
lands, how lungs cave to accommodate.
Such climes aren’t even held against her
in this late day. My mother kindly offers
small sips of water, tells her she isn’t going
to hell. Her past is held in memory—distant
even from the gritted eddy of resentment.
In this way, we have set her free.

This is a way we set her free—
my sister’s therapist confirms that we
are the last to carry this womb-line,
these eggs of my grandmother’s dna.
“Cool, right?” my sister says. She has a son.
 I won’t be having children—decided—
though sometimes I see a little girl almost
like me: so magical & brown sugar sweet,
I can’t believe I chose not to hold her.
Instead, unfurled her from my body
like a brilliant kite to the sky, streamers
on gentle wind, tiny flags of surrender. Surely
this, too, is a healing from womb to womb.
Surely, all mothers of a line can’t be storms.

I am sure all mothers of this line aren’t storms.
My own, for example, attentive at her mother’s
bedside despite those mothers before her; batter
& tumult as far back as anyone remembers.
When mom was still a girl, my grandmother
snatched the thick beauty of mom’s waist-
long hair, watched her cry through the cut,
then framed the braid in glass & tucked it
in the back of an overstuffed closet. Still,
my mother wipes shit from her backside
with the tenderness of late spring rain,
which falls less & less often on the heated
earth. Every storm carries a memory of rain’s
softness within it: this is what we crave most.

There’s a softness within that we crave most,
my sister & I, all crust & guard on the outside.
The therapist says, microchimerism:
cells of the daughter nesting in the mother
for decades after birth; my sister inside
my mom; my mom inside her mother;
no way out except death. My daughter,
inside me only & I will have no one
to offer me sips of water after terrorizing
a family spliced together by birth.
Would I have told her she was beautiful?
Would my voice have been a cold, wet slap
or a cool breeze through her hair?
What kind of mother is a rainstorm?

The kind of mother that made storms of rain
must now be coaxed to take water. But
it is not me who does this – I want to do
the clearing out. In the dying room, I dust
tchotchkes off the dresser, decipher old recipe
cards shoved into pockets of dust coats,
dig into the back of closets. I find my
mother’s hair, luxe as a mink stole,
encased in glass like a window shuttered.
When my grandmother dies, my mother & I
will start a fire, make it sacred with sage
& motherwort. We will toss the braid
across alder logs. We will feel its heft,
marvel at its density, watch its long burn.

We marvel at the density, watch the long burn
of a summer spent dying. My grandmother
in her home hospice bed, the windows open
to the river downhill, sludge-gray, immobile.
When I enter the room, she tells me I’m beautiful,
to sit here while I take a nap, her dry hand
gripping mine. There are reasons I hate
this compliment from her but what I remember:
my child-fingers in forest-filtered sun, tugging
the tart gems of red-orange huckleberries
until there is enough for the pie only she
has the recipe for. This is the danger of having
memory & no window to fling it through; no
cloud or wind to take it up & make weather.

Cloud & wind take it all up to make weather:
the night she dies is swallowed by thunder
& lightning. Her brow furrows against
morphine & we sit on the floor of her bedroom,
watching fire thread through the clouds,
listening to rare sounds of summer rain.
Thinking of her huckleberry pie & tendency
to snatch hair. How exhausting the chimera
of love & hate. How, like a motherhood,
we learn to brace for blue sky, too. Storm-
lines, motherlines—ending & what can we do
but thank god for framed glass & that we can
face it; for fat dollops of rain & sweeping wind.
We leave all the windows blindness & open.
 

—Lisbeth White

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