When Teeth Hurt

Last week my teeth fell out. One by one they crumpled
into paper, dissolved into sand. I woke up and touched
them, counting them. In Nicaragua they say that teeth-
falling-out dreams mean death. Call your family, they
warned me. Someone’s surely in danger. Last week your
teeth started to hurt, your head pulsed, you couldn’t
walk. You were rushed to Buffalo General Hospital,
placed in a room with the view of the old train termi-
nal with its broken art deco promises. Half a continent
away, I took three days to reach you, as absent as Peter
was from the Cross. The “rock” on which Christ built
his Church was really a smooth sea of crumbling teeth.
I have no idea where I’ll be at the moment of your
death—perhaps holding your hand, or perhaps giving
a lecture in Dallas or walking across Spain. Mama. For
thirty years I’ve held this broken mirror in my pocket.
The first time I sat in a hospital waiting room on a
radiant October day, I was twelve. You were fifty-three.
I feared you wouldn’t come out. I threw up the banana
muffin bought from the hospital cafeteria, and to this
day I can’t eat banana-flavored anything. Whenever
you showed up late to pick me up from basketball or
choir practice, my first thought was the same: This
is it. Like those falling October leaves that shine and
crumple, so far you’ve not gone. You’ll live to 100, just
to piss me off. But one of these times . . . No. I can’t.
Today is your eighty-first birthday. Your present is an
angiogram, five arterial stents. I bring you orange roses
and yellow balloons. We play crazy eights and pray the
Divine Mercy Chaplet. You tell the priest who comes to
anoint you that he needs to make his sermons less bor-
ing. I comb your hair, white at the roots, fiery red at the
ends. A Polish flag. I fill the plastic basin with water,
bring it to your bed. I watch you brush your teeth.

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This poem also appears in the June 2023 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 88, No. 6, page 8). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.