Sometimes I call my split ends “dead ends,”
but really all visible hair is dead;
it’s the root that’s still buried inside that lives.
We carry dead hair and dead skin
and wear clothes made of dead animals
and yet our biggest fear is death.
We are covered in what we run from.
We run from what we cannot escape.
Life is just one big dead end,
a journey that always lands in the same place
or no place.
All journeys, no matter how different,
end in the same unknown.
Life is a sentence
with a question mark
never answered until…
I’m trying to make death my friend.
I don’t want to live a life in fear of what happens
when I’m no longer living it.
Because someday I will no longer be living it.
So many of my loved ones now have the answer
I can’t know until I join them.
And someday I will join them
so someday I will know.
And I don’t want to fear that day anymore.
I want to think wherever they are
isn’t something to run from.
I want to think that when death comes for me
it will come wearing a wedding dress
and promise me an eternity
of love, or something like it.
Hold out my past cats purring into the ether.
Grandpa, with both of his wives,
unliving both of his lives.
David beside him, Aunt Marianne…
I’d like to think the death that shrouds me
is less like a shadow and more like a blanket or a towel:
something to keep me safe while I travel,
waiting for me like a bed at the end of the day.
Something that reminds me that death
never really leaves the living—
all the pieces of us that shed and fall
don’t fall away.
Death doesn’t mean disappear.
Death stays.
As published by Red Wolf Periodical, fall 2023
Lisa Hartsgrove 