The End

The End

If I can think something, I’ll talk about it.                              

Like my penis or bed farts

or that man I saw jump out a window

splatting  his head on the roof he hit in the end.

That makes some uneasy.

I’m instead tied with the label

“Plain-spoken folks,”

because I’ll discuss most anything.

I think it’s anything but plain speaking;

more profound is what I think.

But I like being a “folks.”

It’s a word that doesn’t address geography

or size or religion.

It’s a word without judgement

so I can be just a part of all; a someone in everyone.

Talking about “the end”

is  one of my plain-spoken thoughts.

As a kid it was a far-off thing.

Something for which I had

To dress up in itchy clothes and sit

fidgety-silent in the church basement

while older folks cried

and ate store-bought cookies and drank yukky coffee.

Then I went out in the cold

and sat some more while they put a box

with somebody inside into the ground.

I had to kiss my Grandpa one time at “the end”

but he wasn’t my real grandpa and he was cold.

After, I didn’t like going to those endings

so I put up a fuss so bad they stopped making me go.

In school I was told this girl in my class got sick and died.

It was only somebody telling me something

like the feed store burned down

but I remembered it even if I never saw her again.

Later there was this disease called AIDS.

I had many friends who got it.

 In spring someone would finally tell me and I’d go visit.

Each time they got thinner and more frail but we didn’t talk much ending

 because it made them uneasy

so we just drank wine and got silly.

Then, before next spring they ended, and I wrote beautiful things about them, and cried,

and went back to work on Monday.

But I did really try to understand the end.

 My Mother had a stroke and went to the nursing home

and my days were working and seeing her

for too long a time in my thinking but short for life.

 

She couldn’t talk, but through her eyes I knew she didn’t want to go on

so I signed the paper and in three weeks she met her end.

That ending was the hardest one for me ever

because I couldn’t imagine life without My Mother

but blasé life went on.

My dear friend Annie taught me most about the end

Annie had fought cancer for years.

Her priest gave her last rites 3 times.

 She lived in a hospital bed in her living room

so she could look out her big window at her beloved Colorado mountains.

She called me at work one day and told me she was done. 

Her patience, her resolve, her determination were finished.

 She sought her own end. 

On her terms.

Annie stopped eating.

 I made the plane reservations that day

and was amazed that she ended even before my flight two days later.

Experiences open the door to thinking about my own end,

 so I should talk about it like plain spoken folks do.

In my bad car accident or my several times of hospital anesthesiology,

I really didn’t mull about my end.

Because I just believed I wasn’t ending then.

When I got told of my cancer

ending was a far-off thing again.

I guess I just can’t get my mind to accept something beyond sleeping

which is only a suspension to me.

I think a lot about Mama Cass ending choking on a chicken salad sandwich she was eating in bed. 

But I still eat in bed.

Endings of friends hit me more often now.

They are more than folks.

They are my age or sometimes even less.

I’ve been a lifelong part of them,

and I miss them but can’t think of them being around anymore.

Except in my head,

just wishing that they could be but knowing they can’t.

So why can’t I think of myself being around no more?

I don’t think about life going on,

I just vex about it going on without me.

And that’s the hardest part of my living.

Not being able to think of a time without me.

My Death escapes me.

even as I won’t escape it.

Sometimes I guess even plain spoken folks

have nothing to say.

-Jerry Wendt 2013

Sometimes things come to me in my sleep and if I arise right then and write them down, they stick. This was one of those.  It needs a couple of edits, and I'm not even sure if it's a poem- but it is one of my more honest things.  Like when I talk to myself, this is the kind of dialogue that goes on.   I hope you find something in it for yourself. -JPW