After Mary Ruefle
In the room where hearts are discussed, my mother’s early death swims before me; a plastic heart, life-size on his desk. I tell the story of the sound* I thought was coming from outside my body (a hedgehog beneath the bedroom window; the low grunting noise they make), and he laughed. My mother died at the age I am now of a blocked artery, fell asleep and did not wake. Was I exhibiting any of the symptoms? Was this a manifestation of my fear that I had reached the year of her death?
A hedgehog follows me around. I hear the same nocturnal sound in a different house—I imagine it is calling for a mate. A low, hoarse, pulsating (gruff) chuff of my heart.
ii. water divining
I was struck by Thomas More speaking of his impending death by beheading: The pain would be quick and God will not let me remember it. And I thought about my life, and by extension, all the pain of a life, and wondered how God would do this—if I were to arrive? I imagined a branch waved over my head in a great swooping magical dance. The water divining rods she has on her all the time, buried in her robes. So much buried there, invisible, useful.
iii. cardiologist II
When I try to tell him what it is like to wake into the void, a timelessness wherein I know my heart has missed a crucial beat, hanging on the dark plane where thought cannot occur, the blood so slowed as to be non-existent. On the rim of death—the antechamber where I can look around, without thought, without mind, alive in the sense of being a bodily presence but no more alive, unable to kickstart the same old trick.
iv. the colour of your horse
She slept each afternoon and died in her sleep. Terrified of cancer she always thought she’d die a lingering death, being a smoker. To die in her sleep—she would never have imagined; she probably prayed for it. Our deaths should be given to us in dreams like the Apache dreamed: knowing the moment, the situation, the colour of the horse you were riding.
* pulsatile tinnitus
