I was twelve years old when my mother told me that my grandmother had died.
But she had been dead for more than a year before I was finally told.
In a way, that was a bigger shock than even her death; that my mother had lied,
And that, for all those months—
Which, for a twelve-year-old, had seemed like a great stretch of time—
My dear grandmother, so good to me, so loving to me—eternally young and old—
Had not been reading all the letters I had written to her, about my boyish pride,
About my many new abilities and accomplishments, and my mind’s ever-growing gold;
Which were really just the fruition of the unfolding of time.
As indeed, so had her death been; because time won’t let us live forever.

-----------------------

But it was not only time that took my kind and loving grandmother.
I learned that she had been taken by my greatest fear;
It had a name too terrible for me to speak,
Almost too terrible for me to think.
In the backward deeps of the years,
From which emerge my giant joys and profoundest fears,
I early learned a word of terror that gave even the adults, then like gods to me,
Visages visibly transformed with fear: the snake that slithers its way into your bed,
Whose fatal bite brings pain beyond imagination’s horror,
And leaves you lingering on, with monstrous daily declines in weight and size;
And puts in fear and pain, like sulpher introduced into a clear-burning flame,
To mar the marvel of light that life kindles in the mirrors of your magically seeing eyes.
A serpent’s sting that, no matter how long or brief it takes,
Leaves you lifeless and cold, inevitably dead.   But I have worse fears than snakes.

-------------------------

When I was eight,
I first encountered a chilling metaphor for human fate.
Going out of the yard, I opened up the gate;
I froze in sudden fear; for there, stretching across and between both posts,
A spider web had been woven in my way; and there, in the web’s center, lay in wait,
What seemed to me to be evil incarnate:
The ugliest, most evil-looking spider I had ever seen.
Waiting for me to walk into it, chest-high.
So that it could bite me, and I would die.

-----------------------

Cancer is a spider.  It killed my grandmother, whom I loved more than my own soul.
Even the word—cancer—is a fearful thing for me to speak, or even think.
Now cancer has caught me, too—I’m captured—it is bringing me to the brink.
I’m afraid—terribly afraid.  Death lasts far too long.  My life has been a blink.
I don’t want to be a spider-bitten, cancer-killed, all-forgotten, cold dead corpse.
All my love, hope, need, desire, knowledge, thoughts, dreams, and memories,
Inhabit here in my heart, which feels immortal—yet fears that it is not.
So all I can do is ask of you, as the Beatles asked Martha: Remember me. 
Don’t forget me.  Don’t let me be forgot.  Let me be, at least, a memory.

=======================


--Written by Michael LP
aka MLP, aka Mr. Poet, aka PoetWithCancer, aka PWC
(I'm just me)
Copyright © 2010 by M.L.P.   All rights reserved