Don’t let go
by Melanie Holmes
A thousand miles away,
too much awry,
your heart broke.
An aortic tear.
Walls built and broken
kept you home.
No call for help.
Two years after Ritter.
Rules ignored.
I found the note,
your best guess,
how long it might take.
Your birthday loomed,
not soon enough.
You turned fifty-one,
hours after you died.
We were supposed to talk to you.
Not about you
to strangers.
We bought a casket
for your birthday.
Unopened cards in your mailbox.
Condolences in ours.
In life, you won.
Our love. Our respect.
In death, you taught us.
Don’t let go.
Melanie Holmes is an award-winning author, freelance writer, and alum of St. Xavier University, Chicago. Her first book (dedicated to her daughter), The Female Assumption, won a 2014 Global Media Award for its message of equality and education for females. Holmes’ passion is nonfiction; tales that tell the stories of our lives. In this vein, she wrote the biography of a scientist who died in the eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980—David Johnston grew up in Oak Lawn and is perhaps more well known in the Pacific Northwest than in Chicago—perhaps his biography will change that. The book is to be published by University of Illinois Press in May 2019. You can find Holmes at www.MelanieHolmesAuthor.com.
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