The last few years were strange.
I don’t remember seeing her in anything but
a flannel nightgown.
Always in bed, reading,
or on the way there. Slowly, with many fits and starts
her reality was flaying away
thinning the border between here
and what she lived in dream. Everything
took on the shine of the unreal,
dream crowding in to take over.
I’d visit, stepping through a door that was like breaching a membrane
and I was in her dream world,
like neither of us was quite tethered in reality.
It unnerved me then.
I didn’t understand why she was in such a hurry to go, but
it’s happening to me now and I
find great comfort in being in the place
that I once unwillingly shared with her so long ago,
even while I’m frightened of what looms next.
I’m not done.