Death, Now or Later

Abstract

After your doctor’s first call to pressure youto prepare for the permanent wound portalto balance life against death - because dialysisis inevitable -, I find you sobbing in your wheelchair.Your doctor calls back to offer you drugs for depression.Really, doctor? This is a man who fears needles, needsto make a desperate decision - not between whole milkor skim - but between death now or later because lifecontinues to leak pounds of urine from his wasting body.Doctor, you offer him drugs. To do what? Render him catatonic,further slow the already erratic beat of this fist, his heart?Turn him into an incapacitated log on a bed that my mother,exhausted, will have to roll over daily to change the soiled linens?Offer Daddy an indirect choice to overdose on the afternoonMami hangs garlands on the fence, have him sneak into the yellow basketof pill bottles and remember that the color of this possible deathcould be too many blue ones?Daddy, cry. The pressure of living or dying is yours alone.Mami, your sons, and I are present to you as you are:loved, scared, elder rendered fragile by an encyclopediaof conditions yet still lucid enough to make your own decisions.