When my dad reached unsteadily from his wheelchair to put my baby’s sock back on, the baby clapped and waved. When I helped my mom to the bathroom, she whispered, My little girl. By then the ache was all around us. But each day the purple morning glories bloomed after the sun rose, and each day promised to be just like the one before. On a scrap of yellow paper, my mother wrote Never give up, and taped it to the mirror.
The details accumulate into their final transformation (into the morning glories’ daily opening and the reminder taped to the mirror). Here and elsewhere, poems are invested in the daily victory of living, even if that victory is surrounded by preparation for loss. In the hospital, a mother walks with her baby, waiting for news from her mother’s bone scan: “Finally, a woman in a white coat asks if I need directions, Because, she says, you’ve been walking for so long. Just waiting, I say. Just waiting sounds like just looking, as if I’ve entered an elegant store where I can’t afford anything and can’t wait to leave.”
McGookey has a gift of noticing distinct peculiarities around life events, such as birth or death—in “After,” she writes of the interactions immediately following her mother’s death:
I hadn’t expected to like the undertaker, a man young as my brother who arrived at the house within an hour, who told us his mother died the week before. I’d expected his firm handshake, his dark suit. But he said, I’ve come at a bad time, because I had raised one finger—wait a minute, please—before I opened the door, so I could complain about the hospice nurse who said, over and over, my mother had expired (like milk, like a parking meter).
This book is, more than anything, a study of death written by an adult child, changed through parenthood, watching her own parents die. McGookey tries to put words to her experience both from the personal vantage point and from a metaphorical, metaphysical perspective. In “River Eye,” she writes: “I crouched by the river and scooped Death into my palm”…with Death as a bird who “fledged too soon.” Part Dickinson, part creation myth: “Death opened wide and I fed him live crickets for his long journey. Above us, sky kept right on vanishing.” The irony of Stay is McGookey’s keen awareness that nothing will.