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"Last Words"

By Jane ShoreUpdated Tuesday, June 16, 2009, at 6:47 AM ET

Click the arrow on the audio player to hear Jane Shore read this poem. You can also download the recording or subscribe to Slate's Poetry Podcast on iTunes.

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Once the patient stops drinking liquids, he's got
up to 14 days to live. If he takes even a sip
of water, you reset the clock.

Eleven days without a drop. The rabbi
made his rounds. They stopped her
IV and her oxygen. I asked them
to please turn off the TV's live feed
to the empty hospital chapel, lens
focused on the altar and crucifix—
it seemed like the wrong God watching
over her, up there, near the ceiling.
And because hearing is the last
sense to go, the nice doctor spoke
to me in a separate room. He said
it's time to say good-bye. Next day,
he returned her to her nursing home
to die. Her nurses said just talk
to her; let her hear a familiar voice.
I jabbered to the body in the bed.
I kept repeating myself, as I'd done
on visits before, as if mirroring
her dementia. I rubbed her hand,
black as charcoal from the needles.
I talked the way a coach spurs on
a losing team. Suddenly she opened
her eyes, smiled her famous smile,
she knew me, and for the first time
in a year of babbling, she spoke
my name, then, in her clearest voice
said, "I love you. You look beautiful.
This is wonderful." I urged her
to sip water through a straw. Then
two cold cans of cranberry juice,
she was that thirsty. Her fingertips
pinked up like a newborn's.
I wanted the nurses to acknowledge
my miracle, to witness my devotion
although I'd been absent all spring.
They reset the clock, resumed her oxygen.
I was like God, I'd revived her. Now
I'd have to keep talking to keep her alive.

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Jane Shore is a professor at George Washington University and a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. Her most recent book of poetry is A Yes-or-No Answer.

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COMMENTS

It is not uncommon for dying people to rally a short time before they die. It's a physiological phenomenon, not at all related to talking or stroking a hand. Do the nurses mention that possibility to the narrator? No, they just "reset the clock" (as fine as "made his rounds" for evoking the impersonality of the -- you should pardon the expression -- "caregivers.")

The title indicates that the rally was not a real one. But I like the way the poem ends before that happens. The narrator can only grasp at straws – "I was like God… Now / I'd have to keep talking to keep her alive." What makes this particularly effective is the way it relates to the earlier detail about "God" being an image on a TV screen. The narrator has no more power over the life and death cycle than the "TV's live feed / to the empty hospital chapel." Those two words "live feed" are so evocative in a poem about a dying woman not eating.

Yes, the poem is prosy – deliberately so. The plain language, impersonal at times, clichéd at times, is perfectly suited to this poem about a helpless woman (the narrator) caught up in the impersonal and surreal world of 21st century dying.

-- MaryAnn
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The woman in "Last Words" has been hovering in a terminal condition for some time and has reached the point where she is unconscious and no longer eats or drinks anything. After eleven days of this the doctor supposes that death is certain within the next couple of days and returns her to the nursing home. But "miraculously", she recovers in response to a banal pep-talk from the narrator. The narrator deludes herself that her words have saved the woman's life but it is clear that this is not so.

The nurses know enough to reset the clock but nothing has really changed. Of course we want to feel that a miracle has occurred but there is nothing to suggest this. The narrator's statement "I'd have to keep talking to keep her alive" reflects desperation: do anything you can to hold off the final moment. I find "Last Words" profoundly depressing. I suppose my feeling implies that this is a successful poem.

-- Bottomfish
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