The Wolves
By Paisley Rekdal
It was the week of asking. Asking to watch her eat. Asking if she understood the doctors’ questions. Asking her to explain the difference between wanting to die right now, and dying later.
The tumor making certain answers unquestionable. I watched her point to the incense dish from which someone swept all the ashes up. Asking if she recognized us. Because that is what the living want: thinking it is a sign we have been loved.
But the answer was a summer drive, a mountain, piles of leaves beneath which a wolf slept, suckling her cubs.
Some deaths are good and it makes them hard to grieve.
She was, at times, in great pain. We wanted her to die, too. That was important. But first we wanted her to remember.
From the bed, a finger pressed into a pile of leaves. Gray haunch, unmovable ashes. I didn’t want to disturb their tableau, she told us. And drifted off. And we did not know the meaning behind this.
The wolves must have looked so comfortable to her: wordless and in this wordlessness perfect. Did she want to go there, too.
I could point to the image and say, my father must be in there, my uncle. Or: the wolf is you, you are still the mother, as if necessary to name that self at the end of its world. An animal cry, memory. That was our selfishness.
As death was hers. She insisted upon it.
And why not. It was good for me to get a chance to know you, she said, who had known me my entire life. Then the pills, a small handful, crushed into juice.
She was happy then. We all were. Or said we were. What is the difference now.