Truth in the Key of C

When I was young, we visited my great aunt,
a product of the Victorian age,
with all the right forks and china without chips.
Her skin was paperwhite thin, wrinkled
with two perfect spots of rouge,
one of each cheek, almost clownlike
were it not for the residue of seriousness
that rested behind her eyes.

Fierce in her manners and opinions
she only softened when she sat in front of her pianos
and played.

Then, someone else emerged,
a woman without age or history,
leaving behind rules and appearances
to simply be who perhaps, she was meant to be,
for only then did you see her smile
beyond her lips to her eyes.

When I was sixteen, she was dying,
spending the last months of her life in our living room,
her life dripping in excruciating drips,
robbing of her ability to do
the things of every day life.

We dyed her hair, her forever red.
We served her breakfast on china
with the perfect number of forks.
We brought her tea.

On her last days, we would prop her at the piano
and she played the music of a six-year-old,
simple and plodding, but still hers,
washing away the pain, becoming once again,
herself.

About this poem. 

This narrative is written around my Great Aunt Helen and is mostly true in the details. But that lesson, of how, as long as we do the things we love, we are our best selves, has stuck with me more and more as I age.

The picture was taken at Hildene, the Robert Todd Lincoln home.

Tom