How do you describe it? The feeling you get deep down inside yourself when your looking down at her? When you hold her frail hand in yours and grasp it as if you could lend some stability to her fragile mortality. When you see her and see everything that escapes those around you.
You see yourself in her, in her dimming eyes because when she is gone she takes a part of you with her. You feel responsible for the wrinkles around that shade of somber blue because you know the exact way she squints a little when she’s laughing; when she smiles. You know the way she gathers her anxious feelings in the crease between her brows. You see all your childhood, all your life and love and existence mapped out on her aged skin like a map to the parts of yourself you could never quite find, never quite understand. You see the scar on the tip of her index finger where she prodded herself on the tip of a seam ripper while mending your torn heart. You are perceptive to the way she has shrunk under the weight of all of her disappointments and hopelessness’ in equal parts with your own and you wonder how, in the perfect silence interrupted only by her shallow breaths, you will ever see anything else. You begin to wonder how you will ever find yourself. And you shudder when her stare focuses in and out like her consciousness, like her memories giving you glimpses of the things being torn from you. Like a phantom limb a place in your chest aches where things once were only to discover empty space a lack of movement when you try to use it. I see anger at her life, at her death, I see loneliness and hopelessness, I see laughter and tears, confusion and purposelessness, I see abandonment and acceptance, I see vulgarity and patience,
I blink
And see only the greatest of absence I have ever known,
And I remain where I am with my eyes clinched closed
Afraid  only to see what I can’t.