You were almost 19 in October 2017, and among the hovering family in the hospice room where your grandfather was dying. As the deathwatch ticked hour on hour, I was anxious for how you would cope. From my bedside station at dad’s head, I sneaked looks across the room, right past his face, to check your face. I soon stopped checking as you slipped naturally into a pastoral poise that seems born in you.

You might remember those minutes of what I call, in this poem, his last sermon. That might be a bit much; it might have been his last dreamscape. He sat upright in bed and seemed to talk to an unseen, distant audience. Sentences and phrases weren’t quite coherent. As if the scene was familiar to him, yet shifting. I pulled my notebook closer and furtively scribbled some quotes. From those notes I later assembled this poem, like a puzzle piece.

You know how dreams often are a stream of disconnected images or scenes, one after the other? We wake puzzled, and as we go through our day we reserve a small back room in our mind where we fiddle with re-arranging the puzzle pieces, looking for a plot. Whether we would say it aloud or not, we believe the plot of the dream is somewhere in the mind of the dreamer, even if it might only show itself if we just let the broken images gently sit next to each other till they wake, recover from gibberish, and talk their sense. Sometimes they do, usually they don’t.

In the most wakeful lifetime there are scenes like those dreams,. They’re not quite right, they don’t fit. Death is the one scene that never fits and it’s no use trying to make it part of the plot. Christian theology rightly labels death “the last enemy” and I, for one, am happy I am not required to like it or say things in hospice rooms that pretend it makes sense. God was so unsatisfied with that script that He wrote Himself in as a character to mock it on our behalf. So there’s no deathbed scene in anyone’s life which actually works. We’re allowed to hate it. God hates it.

There’s a place in art for the broken image. Sometimes it works, but sometimes it just annoys the audience, since our minds are story-making engines, designed by a story-making Designer. We can’t help it. So I’ll admit I gently pushed together some phrases, hoping they could sit in a hospice vigil with each other. The reader will either listen for the gibberish to clear or pass on, annoyed.

I pushed some phrases beside each other but I created none. “Boundered Lip” is an expression I’m most sure he said; I wrote it down. And the one I least am sure I understand. I can guess; I can speculate high-sounding things like the limits of human speech to make sense, and so on. I’ll stop there.

So, as I said, I pulled my notebook over and scribbled some phrases as your grandfather spoke his last words. Your grandfather’s favorite hymn was “The Love of God”. We sang it as he died. My brother played the guitar.

---