Ceaseless Rain, Dorothy Mahoney
Palimpsest Press, 2020
In “Heat,” a husband stuffs the socks of his dying wife into his pocket. Her toes are “stiff, pointed as if she were a ballerina” after a night of fever. Outside, it is cold. He wears a jacket and the nurse tells him “that an elevated temperature is normal as her body prepares to shutdown.” He asks the nurse, still not really believing that his wife is actually dying in front of him, whether or not “Tylenol would help.” In “Neapolitan,” a hospice patient “asks for ice cream every morning after breakfast.” Nearing the end, he feels restless, asks “What do I have to look forward to? What? Tell me that.” His caretakers answer, “ice cream. Maple Walnut.” These are the little things that make up the hours and days of the dying, and Mahoney has documented them with a poet’s eye and attention to detail, as well as with love and care. The poet does not shirk from looking death in the face, but learns lessons from observing its universal characteristics, as well as its particular curiosities.
In a series of poems about the ache of loss and grief, Mahoney writes, in “The map of sorrow,” of how grief is so uniquely experienced, but that the roads are always “washed out, culverts flooding,/and the windshield wipers pulse faster than the heart./There’s no seeing past it.” In “Dinner,” the poet longs for her father. She fashions a dinner table, imagines him seated at it, and recalls his advice to her. She misses him terribly and so writes: “I hunger//for the way he held his knife and fork,/the way he palmed his cognac glass,/chewed the end of his cigar.” Looking down the table, though, there is just “the other chair pushed in,/lights dim.” In “Small hands,” Mahoney has fashioned a poem for a premature baby who has died. The child has not been given a name, so is bequeathed “toys boxed in the attic, scuffed baby shoes, knit blankets.” The final line rings in a heart: “Let there be three births: the thought, the act, the you.” We are not defined by our deaths, she says. We are defined by our lives—however short or long they may be—and by how deeply we touch one another’s souls while we share the journeying.
The things we leave behind, the things we inherit and that are passed down, also hold space inside this collection. There is “Mrs. Klein’s dishes” and “Cleaning out the kitchen,” as well as “Copying Mrs. B’s cake recipe displayed at her reception.” All of these poems document what comes after death, and of how items that once were important to a deceased person are now not as important to those who have survived their departure.
In Ceaseless Rain, Dorothy Mahoney has acted as a witness and recorder, as a helper and caretaker, as well as a documentarian. She has walked mindfully into the sacred spaces where dying actually lives. These poems are unique and important ones, mapping out final days in lives that were full, vibrant, and diverse.
