It’s interesting, after my post yesterday, we left to visit my father and mother and got back a little before 6:00. Busy with dinner preparations, cleaning up and other assorted activities I did not check my email until this morning.
To my surprise, I had 4 emails about my post. 3 from friends or acquaintances and one from someone I don’t know, which doesn’t happen often unless it’s spam and this was not.
All of the questions centered around the idea or inspiration for my poem. Some who knew me better and are aware of what’s going on with my father asked if that ongoing event was what inspired my writing. The person unknown to me was just curious.
I’m sure my fathers illness and his failing health certainly contributed to my mindset as I lay awake with words and thoughts swirling through my head but, I think The Flame is about the arc of the human experience from birth, through our growth and peak of physical/professional/social position to our inevitable decline and death. As I said, the human experience in 8 lines of verse.
On a different but related subject, the visit with my father helped me tremendously. We almost lost him Wednesday, it was very touch and go as his disease was causing many other complications. I feared two things. 1) That he would pass away in a hospital, a place he’s always hated, surrounded by anonymous people covered head to toe in PPE . 2) That my last memory of him would be him sitting in a car in a Wells Fargo parking lot, masked and weak and 10 feet away.
My father is home now, still weak but in no pain he claims. He’s somewhat surrounded by family, as surrounded as it gets in the times of CV-19. I’ll have more on this later, it’s still a bit raw for me.