It's Okay
Andrea Hollander
In so many films, a family gathers around
the bed of the one near death, hoping
the far-off son will get there in time.
The family doctor stands at the foot
in his three-piece suit.
If the film takes place early in the last
century, maybe a new, black Ford pulls up
in the gravel drive. We in the theater,
buckets of popcorn in our laps, hear
the crunch of its tires.
Such a scene I never privileged firsthand,
my 51-year-old mother having died alone
just after dawn in that pale green room
on the third floor of the hospital, where I drove
every day to be with her those last weeks.
I want to imagine a flurry of birdsong
that morning, a family of starlings or finches
in the huge cottonwood near the entrance
to the hospital, where I would stop briefly
beneath its wide canopy of shade.
Fifty years later, I wonder if that tree
is still there. It could be, couldn’t it? I know
the offspring of starlings and finches return
to the same tree generation after generation
to birth their young.
Couldn’t they—like a scene in a movie—
have been singing that morning just as
the sun came up? And couldn’t my mother
have heard in their song the voices of us humans
—her humans—as though my father, brother, and I
had drawn ourselves around her bed, urging her,
"It’s okay, you can let go now, it’s okay."
This relatively new, unpublished poem addresses the deep sadness I've felt since my mother's death at 51 in 1970. While I've written about her numerous times since then, none of my previous poems addresses this particular irrepressible image of my mother alone at the very end of her life.
For me, the breakthrough to the creation of "It's Okay" came when I was at home watching an all-too-familiar scene in a British film. I actually paused the film, pulled out my notebook and penned the poem's first draft.
ANDREA HOLLANDER is the author of six full-length poetry collections and has received number awards, including two Pushcart Prizes for poetry and literary non-fiction, and two fellowships from the National Endownment for the Arts.