The Last Breakfast

The last time we spoke, she was cooking bacon.
It was early in the morning, one week
before she died, a fortune
neither of us would have predicted

after a long walk in the March air,
and talk of Easter and the consequences
of letting ourselves be smothered by duty.
She was concerned about death,

mine, not hers, and told of her desire
that I do not follow in her footsteps,
that I seek joy while I could still dance,
while there was music left in my heart.

She hugged me before I began the long journey north.
She told me she loved me.
She smiled a bittersweet smile and reminded me
to make my own mistakes, not to make hers.

and hugged me again, her eyes bright with life.
A brief wave as I pulled away for the long drive home,
watching her walk to the house in my rear view mirror,
bright sun on her red sweater.

A week later she was dead,
I had returned in those last days
to see her, alive simply because the tubes and machines
would not let her leave, a science fiction kind of death.

But that is not how I think of her.  I remember her in the kitchen,
with bacon and eggs and an insistence,
strange for her, that I follow a path of joy and safety,
a path she had not chosen, but wished so deeply,

she had.

About this poem. 

My mom died a year ago today. I had breakfast with her one week before her death, which was unexpected. That last breakfast, and the things shared there, is the memory I hold perhaps dearest of the many good times I recall.

Tom