CHEST
Editor’s Note: Dr Cavano is a psychiatric and geriatric pharmacist.
She writes, “My mother was diagnosed with breast cancer when
she was 42 and died at 47 when I was 18. My focus was to describe
the first and only time I ever saw my father cry.”
Pectoriloquy
Editor’s Note: Ms Clarkson writes, “This poem is based on a
story told to me by one of my patients about his grandparents
about 70 years ago in Montana. I worked for many years as a
professional librarian. After caring for my mother through a long
illness until her death, I re-careered as an RN. I currently work in
Hospice and Community Nursing.”
The Decision
Beneath the jaundiced gaze
of the moth-covered porch light,
my father tells me
mother has made a
“unilateral decision”
to stop all
extraordinary medical treatment.
Why does he use
these cold, military terms?
His face twists and cracks
releasing meager tears
like water wrung
from parched rocks.
Jeanette Michele Cavano, PharmD
San Francisco, CA
Deep Mercy
Copper, his life given for this
shine. Now he goes even deeper
into the wet collapse of lungs,
hunting, desperate, for any vein of air.
The miner, retired, slumps over his
coffee mug, gasping like the rainbow trout
he cast on Montana’s riverbanks.
She is at the range, stirring, watching
sideways, her air wrinkling
into his, so that as she forces out
breath, she panics and calls it back.
She packed his lunch for thirty-five years,
worrying while he headed for shafts
where, beyond daylight, he harvested the stuff of
wire, bullets and pennies.
He is coughing again, shaking the table,
sloshing coffee, hot, onto his hands.
She moves across the kitchen, then,
knowing he is ready.
“May I lay upon you one more time my husband?”
Weary as habit, he follows her up
impossible stairs, stopping on every other one
to wheeze and pant, collect enough
wind for one more tread
toward the room where he hasn’t slept for years.
Editor’s note for authors of submissions to Pectoriloquy:
Poems should not exceed 350 words, should not have been
previously published, and should be related to concerns of
physicians and medicine. First submissions to the Pectoriloquy
Section should be submitted via e-mail to [email protected].
Authors of accepted poems will be asked to submit the final
version to CHEST Manuscript Central.
—Michael Zack, MD, FCCP
© 2012 American College of Chest Physicians. Reproduction
of this article is prohibited without written permission from the
American College of Chest Physicians. See online for more details.
DOI: 10.1378/chest.11-2450
journal.publications.chestnet.org
The ceiling sighs, the bedsprings creak
once, then again, as she drapes her body
over his, presses down, breasts to chest,
so that no amount of will can make
it rise. Silence, then weeping. An old
remedy. A kindness, really.
Joanne M. Clarkson, RN
Olympia, WA
© 2012 American College of Chest Physicians. Reproduction
of this article is prohibited without written permission from the
American College of Chest Physicians. See online for more details.
DOI: 10.1378/chest.11-2394
CHEST / 142 / 1 / JULY 2012
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