Here’s one excerpt about my old man. It’s better than anything I’d done before. But it still sounded so emotionally bald that I only sent it out to a magazine at my husband’s urging.

I tell the only truth I know:
that I am helpless and sorry you’re dying,
that this planet will weigh no less when you
are ash. . . .
and if, as Buddha says, life and death are illusory
I will be fooled and suffer your absence,
and somewhere you’ll always be
rising from your oxygen tent, a modern Lazarus,
or snapping open a Lone Star beer,
or simply, too tired to talk, scraping mud
from your black work boots onto the porch.