Fought Tooth and Nail, I Know You {for Ellie}

Tribute to a close friend who suffered from Alzheimer's Disease.

Didn’t even get to say goodbye. Alzheimer’s stole that much
of you.  Threw what words would come to the wind.
Made every face strange, every hand a stranger’s.  Like
bad origami?   If you understood a word we said, had no
way to let us know.  I sat beside you, willing you back
in your cluttered, sunflower splashed  kitchen, slinging flour
around and humming along with a classic on public radio.
Couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket, but that bread with molasses
and wheat germ you invented is to die for.  Pass the butter
and put on the kettle, ‘k?  Take our spiked zingers to the sun
room you worked miracles with, see if the hen-and-chicks
you set out survived those thunderstorms.  Soon want
to be up-and-doing, knowing you.  I will follow you upstairs
and watch you stitch more seams of the suit you’re making
out of one of your old WAC uniforms.  Your gray eyes go
wide at the very idea of tossing anything still has good left.
When sitting at your ancient Singer gets to your back,
always a sock monkey for a child in the hospital waiting
to be finished.  Your two grew so fast. . .so fast.  

All work and no play?  You kidding?   Laugh ‘til we hurt.
You are a stitch!  Long, strong-jawed Yankee mug
and spare frame oddly handsome.   Character is written
all over you.  Pulling yourself up a struggle, and it shows.  
Thirteen of you on that hardscrabble far in upstate
New York.  Thirteen!   Can’t imagine.

Had a taste of honey, you said when your husband,
immobilized by arthritis and injuries from a car accident,
died of complications.  He’d become surly and demanding,
but in sickness and in health meant just that.  May have grown
up waiting in line to use an outhouse, but you knew right
from wrong.  I miss you so much, Ellie.  I miss your strength.
I miss your laugh.  I even miss the way you’d jerk a knot
in me when I felt sorry for myself.  Have to find a cure.  Have to!