A History of Dying Spaces

Only my grandmother came home to die.
Her centuries old home was built 
with a birthing and dying room,
two small bedrooms, a library 
and as was custom, no parlor

She went through the process of life
in private but away from the spaces 
entirely reserved for birth and death.

Home was a place where she ate,
sat still, stared and meditated
day after day at the place where she 
came from and would finally end up.
That was the way it was suppose to be.

On that day, she sat in her old mahogany 
birthing chair and closed her eyes 
until they no longer fluttered.
Her hand fell on what was my mother’s 
old crib, rocking it three times.  
She was moved to the smaller room
long prepared for her body .
Her dying room had no light, 
just a small bed with fluffy pillows.

My mother was a living woman. 
When she bought her Miami house
near the beach and the bay
she made certain there were 
no birthing and dying spaces,
just lots and lots of living areas:
four bedrooms, a sunken living room
that took more than half the space,
a well-breathed kitchen, a good size 
open Florida room and beyond that
a screened-in clear blue pool
equal to the size of the living room.
This was the way she knew it was 
suppose to be for her and for us. 

She died on a flesh covered La-Z-Boy
in the TV-room of a much smaller house,
the arm rest worn through by constant 
gripping, the foot rest half kicked off from 
the convulsion prior to the hear attack.
I had just returned from seeing 
Fatal Attraction at the mall Megaplex.
Thirty-five years later I’ve yet to rewatch it. 

My father must have been thinking of his death
when he built his open house atop the charred ruins 
of a post Civil War estate with servant quarters and
stables that overlooked Frenchman’s Cove in Maine.
The house was a wing cut from the air and 
nailed to the rocky shore. The gentle waters of the bay
ached daily to caress the sighing foundation beneath
as if the water and air always knew and was now
retelling the story of every birth and death in the 
front and back spaces  of  their proper time.
My father  found peace there and  called it Tranquility.
But the soil and tide knew from the soft screech 
of the sky that he would be denied his wish to die there.  

My father, a doctor, specialized in obstetric anesthesia,
and started his.practice just on the fringe when 
birthing rooms were yielding to maternity wards.
On a bright day in his study overlooking the bay,
when he stared looking like he might be 
turning the corner on a recent malady, 
he turned pale and gray and short of breath.
He was passed from smaller hospital
to bigger hospital until he finally landed 
in the University hospital where he taught 
for many years, in a private room amidst 
the throbbing and beeping of machines
he was intimately comfortable with.

On his second day in hospice, the machines 
were disconnected and under the lightest 
of anesthetic drugs he took his last sleep. 
The interns said it was an honor 
to treat him until his last dying breath.

I don’t know if I will pass in a dying room
of my choosing.  it will certainly be far 
removed from the room I was born. 
Most likely I will die in the wrong place,
like most everyone else. As you have 
read, the odds are less than one in three.
that nature or fate or God will get it right.   

Time is too much about different 
arrangements of proximity to be relied on.
So much depends on who goes in front of me.
Who is besides me and/or behind me.
Or just elsewhere, missing, soon to come.
it all depends on how attenuated I am 
to the living and dying spaces around me.
How undoubtedly some one else 
or no one will write or even remember 
my ending and beginning