I Am No Stranger

I watched it take many close to me –
death –
I am no stranger.

I never got to meet my father’s mother
who everyone says I look just like.
Cancer took her when my dad was 18.
“She would have just adored you,”
they all say,
but ill never get to know just how much she would have.

I saw my daddy cry so hard he could hardly speak.
“I'm gonna try and get through this so bear with me,”
he said at his adoptive fathers funeral,
his real father.
Cancer took him when my dad was in his 40s.
He watched as they pulled the plug and drove home in tears.
It hurt me to see him hurt.

My mother felt it too.
Her father passed a year later
and we all watched him
attached to machines that breathed for him.
It was dementia that made him forget he was hungry
and other diseases that got him.
I saw him open casket
and kissed his cold hard cheek.
“I mss my daddy,” she said.
What an emptiness we felt.

I'm not afraid of inevitably dying;
I cant waste time running.
I'm just afraid of how the people I love
are going to remember me at my last moments.