Last day of the month.
You will remember the minutes crowded with meaning, the moment of pain, the aimless hour;
You will remember the cities, and the plains, and the mountains, and the sea…
RESURRECTION
Kenneth Fearing, 1935
My brother Bill was born the year this poem was written. Bill is confined to bed, recovering from a broken hip, in a double occupancy room in a North Andover, MA rehabilitation center. He seems to have slipped into demensia and might speak to me or his wife in a kindly or a nasty manner, depending on his mentally variable mood. His prospects for ever getting out into the world again are thinner than he knows or can ackowledge. We three brothers, the twins and I, do our best to comfort him from afar. Two of us — Doug in Denver, I in Florida — are very far away;
We all wonder what earthly fate awaits us, with our beloved sister already five, going on six years gone. Have I ever fully registered (“processed”) or mourned that death?Bill’s two sons are in far-off Phoenix and the San Francisco Bay area. It is all so sad and so worrisome on this last day of March, 2022.
One morning in 1940, 5-year-old Bill, in the Boston subway with our mother, heading in-town for a shopping trip, standing apart from her, became momentarily frightened, crying, wondering where his mother went. The passengers, all certainly gone now, were warmly observing and ready to comfort and intervene in a small child’s moment alone in the world, the way every Ukrainian child refugee must feel now, staying close to their mothers, if their mothers have survived, in this catastrophic war that is taking the world back to 1939, 1940….
Mother of God, intercede for us, protect us.
The tragic sense of life is everywhere this last day of March. April hours away; what Eliot called the cruelest month, breeding/ Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing/ Memory and desire
And I will miss a deadline for an important writing project, desire beginning to fail me. Memory strong, but not necessarily of the events of recent years that are speeding by.
We must begin again, if we are able, at every moment of our lives. And may my brother Bill find some comfort where he lay at this hour, so helpless, the first-born of Bill and Joe Wayland on September 16, 1935. We’ve been raised to believe that we all have an angel watching over us, even when we are sinning, most especially when we are sick.
I did get a priest for him. And I got word back that he was grateful.
19 Cent Notebook 