How Paths Pass Between Life and Death

A poem

It was a confusing time. I was ten. My grandmother was dying of uterine cancer in the small town hospital and one of my closest childhood friends — whom I seldom saw once I transferred from Catholic to public school, had been hit by a train as she walked alongside the track. She never heard the whistle, and I never heard a different story by the time she left the hospital.

She was thrown and injured but didn’t die, nor did my grandma’s roommate, a girl, years younger than I, who stepped in front of a bus after descending the steps. Her internal organs took months to heal but she liked her long hospital stay where family, friends, and schoolmates frequently visited, bringing sweets and flowers.

I liked to sit in the lobby, outside my grandmother’s room, reading brief stories in Life Magazine about the war and its impact on children in Laos and Vietnam I remember the photo of a young girl running naked down a dirt road, escaping bombs and burning gel falling from the sky.

Life seemed treacherous

My grandmother stopped connecting with the world outside her railed bed She held a rosary in her hands mumbling the same prayer. On her final afternoon she urgently tried to tell me something I couldn’t decipher.

Was it a warning, a benediction, or a beloved Swiss-Italian farming song?