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1.

I thought that if I didn’t tell anybody you were on your way out, nobody would notice. “Time is for the men.” I could see you saying that with a twinkle in your eye at a different time. When Ticu died, we had endpoints. We had three months. Everything was organized. With you it ebbs and flows. We know the cycle will end but there are days and light and markers and rituals but there is something about you that stands outside of that.

You were not the one who went to prison. You didn’t fight. You went to university for a little bit. You were bright, witty, beautiful. Your accomplishment was being a wife and mother. I want to sing the praises because for too long that was kept silent by all. But I wanted to be quiet about it because I thought we could do this ritual in the dark. Most of our men are gone now anyway. There are a few, but they are all by marriage now. Our blood is only the women left. Strange and beautiful, as if we get to have our own mysteries. I don’t want them to know. I don’t want them to have this from us. They’ll only know then. We don’t get to keep any secrets from them anymore.

You get up here, you walk there. You eat and sleep. The smallest things are drawn out now. The medication keeps track of the time. Who knows what it would be like if we didn’t have that clock. Your internal organs still tick. That is the important part.

You are always watching Jimmy Stewart movies. I wonder what it will be like at the very end, if he will be the angel who takes you away, that all-American smile and geewhiz honesty. I hope it is. I wonder if you watch all those films to grasp at the America you loved that you never really got to see in the flesh. I know you were beautiful and I know your first husband lied and cheated. We retell the stories now, too. This is your name. This is your daughter. You have another daughter. I am your granddaughter. As if all the energy contracted back into the tiny cell of “I am.”

One day you will fall asleep forever. I will go on doing the same rituals, too, day in and out. I know it’s wrong to want to tell no one. But in the old days the most sacred places were erased. A small stone, or sand that was swept away. I want it to be like that. I don’t want to tell people that you had an endpoint. I wish we could be in this circle with you forever. But it’s not a line. I know that much. White man ruined that, too. We’ll come back here again. But for now you have to go.