October Snow

Kelly Vande Plasse

We knew the outcome going in.
My grandfather, too weak for surgery,
would be gone within a day or two.

Unable to eat or drink, he defied his doctors,
confounded his nurse, as he had so many times
through his ninety-eight years. And those of us

who had made sudden departures
from our far-flung nesting grounds, thought
that in a few days, like migrating geese,

we’d be flying back home – returning to jobs,
to school, to crush of budgets, schedules, meetings
and conference calls – were still sitting bed-side

a week later, forced to set down our Blackberries
and I-phones and release it all. So there we were,
with the great-grand-children out of school, perched

like puffins on their rocky nesting grounds,
jostling one another for position on the sofa and ottoman
as the older two read to the younger ones. What I have

told them: we are here to accompany Great Grandpa
on his life journey’s end, to talk to him, to hold his hand –
the telling a way to remember the place to which

I have just come. What was left to us then?:
the between-seasons chill of lotion, its cherry vanilla scent warming as it is smoothed from skin to skin

(the skin drying nonetheless, chrysalis-stiff, but keeping
it soft not really the point, after all). Carefully, we combed
his hair, separating strand from strand; daubed water

to slake his parched tongue and lips; read
“The Twenty-third Psalm” and Stanley Kunitz –
as all the while, he shrank farther and farther from us-

became the silhouette of a heron fading in the distance.
As the small hand of the clock began its second
fall through the day’s measured arc, like mist

from a murky marshland arose a low moan
and the murmured assurance, “We’re here, Dad,
we’re here,” followed by the night nurse

with another shot of morphine. Then, from out of the dark pupil of night, a cascade of crystals, like stars come down
to abide on umber earth. Snow in October: that kind

of hush.
This great stillness –
his last gift to us.