Yesterday, I posted a reflection on compassion which I believe is a constitutive element of any authentic spirituality. I told a story about when I was in college and on the receiving end of a simple but profound act of compassionate presence. At the time my mom was dying from Multiple Myeloma—a rather rude, brutal, and incurable cancer of the blood that attacks the bones and various organs. Here is a poem I wrote in 1996 when my three children were nine, five, and one, some twenty-two years after my mom’s death which was one of the most formative experiences of my life.

THE COMING OF YOUR BONES
~ for Catherine (”Nena”) Moran Miller (1917-1974)

My boy is head over heels for bones.
Every day’s a dig. He rakes and sifts
the backyard beds, works his mouth
as he works the earth, coaxes the ground
to give up its mud-dried jewels.

Near his right knee Jackson stacks stones,
brick chips, petrified dog turds into miniature cairns.
The way he involves his head, how he gives
his entire body to one place, one purpose says
believing is seeing. As for me, I’m still finding
my way, doubling back.

Then he discovers me watching him.
He comes running, loud and weird-limbed,
waving what he knows is the relic
of some giant, duck-billed hadrosaur
who lived in our backyard
a hundred thirty-five million years ago.

I think of you
and the coming of your bones,
skin pulled back to skull like a nylon over
a robber’s head. What was taken
can never be replaced. I remember how
you sat Chris and me down, told us they found
holes in your head, how your eyes jumped
catching your laughter in a lie.

We watched your body pull its stunts,
your white cells work their cruel subtraction
like termites scaling stacked white chairs.
We caught your vomit in plastic basins
in the back bedroom while the neighbors
slept through your dying. When your tooth broke
that night at dinner, cracking like a snapped stick,
we pretended not to hear the mean bite of death.

We kept your little secret. We stayed busy
as you wished, observed our meatless Fridays
while God boned you like a fish for fry. Now
you are extinct, engraved in the pink rock
of my children’s faces. When no one is looking
I chip away, pocket what remains of you,
cry Eureka under my breath.

Daniel J. Miller, © 1996. All Rights Reserved.
Photo: 1974, five months before my mom’s death.

♦    ♦    ♦ 

Music has a powerful mnemonic capacity. It functions as a time machine. It stimulates “neural nostalgia.” After hearing only a few notes or words, a song can take us back, especially to our late teens and early twenties, researchers tell us. Neurologists call this the “reminiscence bump.” The year my mom died I used to turn the lights out in my dorm room, stack the records, lie on my bed, and listen to my favorite music. Looking back, the beautiful, melancholic song below was the theme song of my freshman year in college. If I hear it, the inside of my head, heart, and gut are nineteen again and all the emotions immediately come flooding back to that time when I first learned the matrimony of the joyful and sorrowful mysteries of life and love.

~ GOODPEOPLE, THANK YOU FOR READING
THE ALMOND TREE.
Pass it on, por favor.
djm

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