The Story Behind the Poem: For Rhonda or Birds Sing Anyway

      One night in February 2018, my phone rang at midnight. It was a woman from the Emergency Room of Kaiser in Seattle. She called to tell me that my sister was there and they had just discovered that she had a brain tumor. I told her I would be there the next day. My husband made plane and hotel reservations for me and I took the first plane the next morning. Rhonda told me that she had had odd sensations and memory loss-she couldn't remember her computer passwork at work for instance. Her boss sent her home and told her to call her doctor. Her doctor told her to call 911 as she thought it might be a stroke. It wasn't a stroke, it was a brain tumor. They took her in for an operation to do a biopsy and remove any of it they could. I went with her until they wheeled her into the OR and told her I'd be there when she got out.

     They told me to wait in the lobby so I did with the help of some Starbucks coffee. After 2 or 3 hours the surgeon came out and talked to me. He told me that she had a very aggressive form of cancer and because of where it was on the brain they hadn't been able to remove it. He said with chemo and radiation she had maybe a year to live. Without any treatment she would be dead in a month. Unbelievable!

     She was in recovery and rehab in the hospital for three weeks and I was with her. Her friends came to visit and sent daily texts as to how she was doing. At the end of three weeks the hospital was ready to discharge her but there was no way she could take care of herself. So my daughter and I took her home with us to Oregon. The next day she wouldn't wake up. We called 911 and went back to the ER. They said there was nothing they could do and put her into a room in hospice in the hospital.

     I sat by her side every day for a week. Some of her friends drove down from Seattle to visit and otherwise I was pretty much just watching her die. In the middle of this week, one morning I was eating breakfast, feeling pretty down. The day was overcast and gloomy. But then I heard the birds singing. It seemed so out of place! Thus the poem was born. I wrote it that day, probably while I was sitting by her side.

    The poem pleased me because it is concise, even stark. It conveys the mood and its deeper meaning in an economy of words. 

    My sister would have liked this poem and would have been pleased that it was written for her. Do I need to mention how shocking this was and how much I miss her? She died exactly a month after I received that phone call.

    Here is the poem:

          For Rhonda

          The sky is gray

          birds sing anyway

          gray is the color of my mind

          suspended here

          beside you

          waiting

          for death to arrive

          and take you.

          Death is black

          but here it is all gray

          birds sing anyway