Things not to do to a grieving mother

Do not tell her that Grandma is watching her from

        above. She is not religious.           (And nervous about the birds-eye view of her graying

roots.) But don’t question her when she asks to

        burn some cranes and gold-sheeted money just           in case. Whatever you do, do

not crease the paper cranes with your unfiled nails, the white plumes will only

        rip and bleed and stain your kitchen marble

red (it is remarkable how much the surface looks like veins, like rivers of

                            blood disrupting this great plain). Use your finger pads and stroke them, she says.

I always forget to dust the very top of the urn, but it’s hard to tell when the whole house is a swirling gray

haze that swallows

my mom whole. I never ask her what is wrong. I already know she will say

nothing and blame her

glassy eyes on the pollen or the yawning and laugh (something like a

                                                          squeal wrung from the neck). The grief

                                                    forever suspended on a

tightrope rimming her waterline—gripping onto lashes with dull nails.

        I don’t hug her expecting the steady

salt stream to dry up in its bank and reveal the cracked, black mud. The tears

wind through seasons and

                                               fall off the

                                                                           face of this earth.

Do not tell her it was Grandma’s time. That everyone has their time that parents sometimes

die and

          remember that

                                    I am my mother’s daughter. Oh

how I hate that our eyelashes both point down to the scorched earth and we smile with our teeth

and

          tears are squeezed fresh from the heart because I succumb to the fate of forever being my

mother’s grieving daughter.

                            To pick up the ashes and mold them between my palms until I make

                  something I recognize. I can only stand, foot

stuck in warm, scarlet mud, while I watch the pedigree of my family’s

                            grieving women grow.