After all the months that seemed like years,
after all the tears that seemed like fire,
after all the dread and the long, long, tired days
of walking through the maze of cancer-ed life,

After driving back from Florida into the Twilight Zone,
the decade that we called “April of 2020,”
the meetings after meetings after meetings,
working in some sort of hazy drifting,
a constant shifting between fear and anger
and the growing sense
of “What the hell are people thinking?”

After all that time of living with knowing
about your father’s disease,
came that awful aching Mother’s Day morning
when the true nature of all that had been forming
inside his body suddenly came to light
in the harsh bright of the ER department.

In only a few hours then,
he was gone.

Gone the strong hands that worked
for as long as you can remember.
Gone the hands that held children and grandchildren.
Gone the smile and the sad ache in the eyes
that sometimes belied the reassuring,
“Oh, I’m okay.”

In the coming hours and days and weeks,
months and years,
there will come those times of tears and weeping,
the sudden pangs of missing him
and wishing he could have seen this,
all the things that he will miss.

But hopefully, too,
will come some sense of knowing
that he is now beyond all aches and pains,
beyond all grinding agony and helpless loss,
held by the hands that once shaped wood
and raised up houses where none had stood,
hands that healed sinners and comforted the broken,
that brought forth Lazarus from the tomb,
and will—on that One Great Day—
bring your father back to you.

H. Arnett
5/11/20