Closer and closer

She was 46, watching Saturday Night Live I guess.
Her 8-year old, my friend’s boy, found her leaning back on the couch Sunday morning, cartoon time.
Don’t know the details, but the moment haunts me.
Pledged to be there for them, and was for a time. We made a couple trips, us and the boy
before all the rest.

He was 82, on life support after a life of supporting others.
A mentor who once, fittingly I guess, called the wife and me cosmopolitan.
After carrying him home, back at the dry wake, his aid – my buddy by then – offered me a stiff one camouflaged in a coffee mug.
We cried together amidst a well-dressed crowd of the less affected.

He was 71, one-legged since the accident.
18 in the steel mills of Western Pennsylvania.
My father’s best friend I guess, the wife and I visited him in the hospital
because no one else in the family could
or would.
He was lucid then, funny even.
The sight of it, his smallness, seems all the sadder now.

And then mom, lovely sweet-natured mom.
Chemotherapied into submission, faded-before-our-eyes, couldn’t-eat-a-thing, shadow-of-herself mom.
As time dragged her along, the horrible, the unthinkable became… normal.
Welcome, even.
Only it wasn’t welcome, my mom dying wasn’t welcome.
And the rest of it, well…

Despite it all, I woke up today smiling.
The first time in... awhile.
Smiling from a dream of…
… well, I guess it doesn’t matter.
The smile is what matters.
And all the others that they keep saying will follow.