For Three Days

Marie Howe

For three days now I’ve been trying to think of another word for gratitude

because my brother could have died and didn’t,

because for a week we stood in the intensive care unit trying not to imagine

how it would be then, afterwards.

My youngest brother, Andy, said: This is so weird. I don’t know if I’ll be

talking with John today, or buying a pair of pants for his funeral.

And I hated him for saying it because it was true and seemed to tilt it,

because I had been writing his elegy in my head during the seven-hour drive there

and trying not to. Thinking meant not thinking. It meant imagining my brother

surrounded by light — like Schrödinger’s Cat that would be dead if you looked

and might live if you didn’t. And then it got better, and then it got worse.

And it’s a story now: He came back.

And I did, by that time, imagine him dead. And I did begin to write the other story:

how the crowd in the stifling church snapped to a tearful attention,

how my brother lived again, for a few minutes, through me.

And although I know I couldn’t help it, because fear has its own language

and its own story, because even grief provides a living remedy,

I can’t help but think of that woman who said to him whom she considered

her savior: If thou hadst been here my brother had not died, how she might

have practiced her speech, and how she too might have stood trembling,

unable to meet the eyes of the dear familiar figure that stumbled from the cave,

when the compassionate fist of God opened and crushed her with gratitude and shame.