of what lay beneath the glassy surface
of the sea before you,
made you want to dive
deep
into its dark-blue secrets
and trapped air.

You have finally reached bottom.
Now, you are heading up,
as if in an unwinding
of your life’s journey.
So your dying
comes as no surprise,
except to those who thought you’d live
forever. They deceptively cling to you,
as they would a life-raft,
and in the end,
to life itself.

You need this time
to grieve for yourself,
times you fetched
the morning paper from the stoop,
turned over the frying rice,
or helped your daughter with her sweater.
All life’s work.
But to them this grieving means
that you are giving up the sky
or that burst of moonlight above you.
They make you feel guilty
for having lost your hat to the wind,
not trying harder
to beat your illness.

But I see it in your eyes.
You are holding onto nothing.
You are finding
that there’s a certain
grace and relief
in acknowledging
your fatalistic move up
toward the light-flushed surface,
as when you first dove in,
at birth,
and shattered the water.