Spilt Melk: Grandpop's Funeral Poem

Granny asked me to write a poem to read aloud at Grandpop’s funeral and this is what I came up with

“How are you all doing?”
We are—he is not—
the better question
is—how do you spell
hemorrhage?
Because he didn’t die
of leukemia—
but of too much
blood in the brain—
too much blood—
we never thought
he could have too much—
that’s why he went to the hospital every week—
because he didn’t have enough—
enough good blood, enough white
cells and platelets—
but even if he’d had the “normal”
amount, it wouldn’t have been enough
to stop the too much blood,
the bleeding in his brain.

Polaroid shots
on the table, snapped
just weeks before—
how flat a photograph can seem.

We get lost in our heads
trying to remember—
how flat memories can feel—

how real we want the photographs to become.

It’s strange how many times a person can die
inside our own heads,
when we put that tape in the VCR
of our minds and rewind,
the picture comes out fuzzy
and the sound never works right.

We reach out to touch the image
but our fingers are met with a distant
and cool, dusty, slick screen.