Places 26: Facing the Rain

I couldn’t revise Facing the Rain. It was right the first time. In Places in 2011, it was a reader’s favorite. It’s not made-up. It’s a real poem about me and my Mom.

To my mother

Once, in the beginning,
we stood on the front porch
facing into the rain
close and warm
watching together
safe from the storm.

I was barely three,
hugged safely to your side
smelling the lightening,
squeezing hands with the thunder,
laughing when winds blew water our way.

Then the storms came at us
until we became the storms
and more storms came
and we faced them,
not close and warm
but fighting—
facing each other until the end.

Fifty-one years later,
you squeezed my hand again,
close and warm.
And the only thunders were the rattles in your throat.
And lightening went through the bedclothes
So strong—
Two weeks after the funeral
I picked them up from the basement floor
to toss in the washing machine
and they were electric,
charged with the energy of your good-bye.
Ginny Emery©

Afterword 
After my Mom died, I read an article that explained what I felt at her death-bed.  The writer was a physician. As a young man, he’d been part of a medical team studying human brain activity at death. With the voluntary agreement of terminally ill patients, their EEGs (electroencephalograms) were recorded as they died. The study was inconclusive because the scientists could not figure out why, at the moment of death, some EEGs dropped to a flat line, while others spiked up, off the charts.

During the study, the doctor who wrote the article had helped  interview and care for the dying men and women. He’d grown to know them. He was also a Christian. His personal observation and conclusion (not included in the research write-up) was that at the moment of death, it was the EEG’s of unbelievers that fell to flat line. When the Christians in the study died, their EEGs recorded a burst of electrical brain activity that spiked up off the charts.  I found that thought comforting.