Dear Patient Services

respectfully, Elizabeth

I want to thank my two sons, Henry and Oliver, for all they’ve done for me and Sophie the past couple of years. I deeply admire, respect and most of all, love them. Lights of my life. I want to thank, too, my true beloved partner, Carl, who has jumped in the boat and rowed us faithfully and selflessly. I wanted to do that here. Sophie is home from the hospital. She had a different bacteria in her trach and lungs this time, and after five days, we were able to finish the antibiotic at home. I am grateful for that. Frankly (as my father is wont to say), I’ve thought a lot about death of late and writing it down will not make it happen so let’s not go there. Thinking about death, loss and grief, studying it, etc. is thanatology. I have a dear friend who is a professional thanatologist of sorts. She is the one who told me about it, this study. In the photo above, though, I am not thinking about death. I’m around the age my sons are now, 26ish years old. I live in Nashville. I’m recently divorced. I work as a cook at The Slice of Life. I was trained by a man named Paul who was on prison leave. He’d killed his wife, but he was nice to me. I think. Whatever nice meant from a man in 1990. I’ve cut my finger chopping something or other, I am wearing a signet ring on another finger that I received as a gift along with a little white pleather Bible in second grade when I made my First Holy Communion. Slender fingers — don’t touch the wafer, they warned, it’s the body of Jesus. Even if it floated to the top of the mouth, the roof , and hung there, dissolving, I patiently waited. Dear Patient Services, I wrote. The photo. Slender fingers, still. Still with the sad eyes. I will have Sophie with another man in about 5 years but will always miss that first one. The photo spoke to me tonight. I was going to thank my kids here as the good news and then attach the email I sent to Patient Services, a fairly polite complaint letter about our recent experience in the EeeeeeeeeeeR. Instead, it’s this riff on a photo and thanatology, a pit. I am down in it and digging myself out. I have a zinnia garden this year. I made a dish the other night and ate it all: caramelised onions, home-grown tomatoes, gruyere and mozzarella cheese, Progresso bread crumbs, a sort of tartless tart. I bought a very expensive hairbrush on the world wide webs that came in a small gray velvet pouch. Two, actually. I put the small one in my purse. I do these things as I think about death, not in avoidance but more a whatever ,what the hell, I want it? I love it? The Host, the tomatoes, the hairbrush, the zinnias, the lovers, the babies, communion.

Let’s go, second person perspective: Reader, how about you? What do you think about? Where have you been? Who were you?