Dedicated to all those who have suffered memory loss thru the dreaded Alzheimer's Disease

One Last Good-bye
By John Herlihy

There now, dear mother, good-bye, good-bye;
It slipped off the tongue, so easy to say,
Hold back your tears, there is no need to cry,
As a child, I kissed her in a self-conscious way.
I’ll see you no sooner than next July,
Then the entire summer will bring us together to stay.

I was on my way to a boarding school,
My first taste of traveling that later was to become the rule.
Vagabond that I am, I tried to get used to such good-byes;
I always carried a scented handkerchief to later wipe my eyes.
Something about good-bye that is always new and fresh;
My childhood heart sinking and beating as if about to thresh.

Over the years, I said good-bye to my mother many a time;
Whenever I left on another trip, it seemed to echo a sad rhyme.
There is a finality to good-bye that is difficult to dismiss,
When you say good-bye to someone you are certain to miss.
The words seem to cut out a little piece of one’s heart,
After a thousand good-byes, there is little left to break apart.

We never seemed to get used to my coming and going,
Although she always kept her routine of knitting and sewing.
Finally, there came a time when she began to lose her mind,
Not in the sense of going mad, however, it was not that kind.
Fragments of memory began to suddenly break away;
Family and friends had no place in her memory to stay.

Her five children, my siblings, were finally the last to go
She couldn’t remember their names, but she could still sew.
Over the years, we had exchanged letters on a weekly basis;
Letters that regularly arrived where I lived in a desert oasis.
I was the last one she remembered because I was never there;
She was saving one last good-bye, one final emotion to bear.

My brothers and sisters visited her in the nursing home every day;
They fussed and tucked her in, but she never has a word to say.
She had no idea who they were and never uttered their names;
But then I suddenly showed up after being away for a year,
Her face brightened, she sat up in bed and spoke my name, John
She never did say good-bye to me, it was as if I were never gone.