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
