Five of us in high school—
a phalanx unbroken
until we each went off
to different colleges.
We’ll stay friends, we promised;
see you at winter break.

Your favorite joke was,
“If you fart, laugh, and cough
at the same time, you’ll die.”
You walked out on a ridge
and were caught in headlights
flashing off your glasses.

“I saw your friend’s mother,”
my own mother told me.
“Her hair’s gone white, her face
is lined. She’s sold her house.”
And they will never eat
holiday meals again.

Four o’clock in the afternoon.
Sun slants the trees on families
picnicking on the Bermuda grass.

You make your backpack into a pillow
and try to sleep on a park bench
with just a flannel shirt for warmth,

while Robert, in his chrome-studded
black leather jacket and skull-stud
earring talks to another guy,

saying he’s an “American
consumer.” One of the arrows
painted on his jacket back points

two thousand miles away. Maybe
Ma wonders where you are, but Pa
swills his beer and calls you a tramp.

Sure, that D&C embryo
was a curse, haunting you each night,
an extraterrestrial who

could have become yours and instead
it got flushed, like they threw you out.
With that ghost, you wander the streets—

the shelters are just too creepy.
In your dreams you stand at the docks,
and the boat you board drifts unmoored.

Dying must be closing.
It must be shutting eyes.
It must be curled fingers.

Instead you stretched your arms
and reached out for others,
and finding a secret,

caressed it like a stone,
let out a sigh of peace,
and spoke its name aloud.

And your friends took that name
tattooed them on their skins,
passing on the secret.

Dying should be closing
but your open hands made
for continuation.

_________

This elegy is in memory of Larisa Caldwell, a nineteen year-old woman who died of a rare cancer in 1997. Following her diagnosis, Larisa selected the word continuation from 365 Tao as a tattoo. Her friends got the same tattoo in her memory, and this was recorded in a book, Continuation: Honoring and Celebrating the Human Condition by R. Scott Brooks and photographs by Kent Peterson.

Sadly, I recently learned that Kent has died, and that Scott died a few years earlier. They worked to keep Larisa’s memory alive, and I hope that Kent and Scott will in turn be remembered for the beauty that they created.