This week’s episodes are guest hosted by Diannely Antigua.

TRANSCRIPT

I was four years old the first time I went to a funeral. My aunt had passed away after a battle with cancer. We knew she was going to die when she started giving away her things. To me, she gave her collection of Cabbage Patch dolls. I remember holding those dolls, not fully understanding the weight of this goodbye, but knowing it was the final one. I wasn’t protected from her death, and I find myself grateful for that now.

Growing up, the older relatives in my family would say things like cuando yo muera, “When I die.” It wasn’t said in hushed tones. It was part of conversation, very matter of fact, at times part of a joke. But in every instance, they were acknowledging the inevitable without turning away from it.

When it comes to death, we often have a need to witness. It is our human instinct to see and touch, to hear their silence. I remember wondering why it was called a wake service and learning that it comes from staying awake, from keeping vigil over the body before burial. We’re keeping the dead company as they transition, much like we would with a friend at a train station before they move across the country.

And yet, there are deaths I have wanted to turn away from. Once, a mouse drowned in a rice pot I left soaking in the sink. I didn’t want to see it. That was a death I wanted to be shielded from.

We move toward some deaths and away from others. Curiosity and tenderness can exist alongside discomfort. And still, we look. We move closer. We try to reckon with what has changed, what has left, what remains.

Today’s poem leans into that impulse. It moves through the experience of encountering death up close, and the ways we try to understand it.

Goldfish
by Francisco Márquez

After we found it, motionless on the floor, an amber ray
refracting on porcelain, my sister took a knife to its side

and sliced it, two halves revealing a single squalid thing
like the underside of an embroidery. Years ago I was told

the only way to ever know tenderness is to dismantle it,
so I think that’s where our questions began, in the body

of a fish, an animal so invisible it was almost ornamental,
internal organs so translucent they resembled Victorian

gowns, its swimbladder suspended amidst the folds
of its accordion heart, intestine rolled up in the braiding

of a rope, and so much existed inside it (a living machinery!)
that the goldfish became more real in death than in life:

I was ashamed to have thought this, as I was ashamed
in the hospital to see our great-grandmother motionless

in bed, not dead, unable to remember who I was, her stillness
terribly material, somehow weighty but nearly evaporative,

and I wanted to turn away from her, her body emptied
of soul, but I moved even closer, and like one who studies

a corpse to know what it is that moves a hand, I looked
in her eyes to find in them the end of knowledge.

“Goldfish” by Francisco Márquez. Originally published in The Adroit Journal. Used by permission of the poet.