Awakening
When the snow falls in the winter, the wooly caterpillar crawls into a crevice and freezes to death.

It’s blood stops flowing, it’s lungs harden into ice, it’s heart comes slowly to a halt.

The heart is always the last to go.

But when the snow melts in the spring: the ice thaws from it ventricles, the crystals dissolve from it’s lungs. And just as slowly as it died, the wooly caterpillar awakens and comes back to life.

For 120 hours we waited for my sister to wake up.

My family mumbling prayers around the doctor who tell us she fell into a coma when a blood vessel hemorrhaged.

And my father hasn’t stopped praying since.

My step-father searching the eyes of doctors for the answers to those prayers.

My siblings pushing me into the room as though I could preform a miracle.

My mother making twin towers of my arms the way she crashes into them now

While I attempted to believe that my faith far exceeds science and that God would awaken her some how; awaken sweet sister.
Tell me that my tears the size of mustard seeds will fall upon your cheek and move the mountain of swelling inside your brain. Tell me that the same God who makes all things possible can still live up to his name.

Because right now that name belongs to your mother, whos cursing God for being to coward to make up his own mind as she stares at the medical forms granting the hospital permission to let you die.

“If he wants her, than take her” she says. “Who am I to decide?”

And be her side is your fiancé, whos fists are stones he’s ready to throw if the doctor mentions organ donation just one more time. But your father, he sits still praying at your bedside. Wrapping rosaries around your hands, and tucking prayer cards behind your neck.

“God will resurrect my daughter” he says. “Please God, tell me she’ll resurrect.”

How do I respond?

How do I agree when the tubes of your IVs intertwine around my throat? Strangles my voice every time I plea “Awaken sweet sister.” Make this poem easier to write.

Tonight, pull out the respirator in you throat and speak the words that will end this poem brighter than it begun. Removes the tubes and we’ll blow kisses into your veins, that you may know where the true source of your life comes from. How it comes from your heart. How in this hurricane world you broke into tiny pieces, and dropped them like care packages in our laps. How you always had enough to give, which is why theres 200 people in the waiting room now ready to give it back. Incase you need it to live.

But on the 7th day, the doctor gave us the results of the last test my sister will ever take.

And I swear I’m not built for earth quakes like that.
My knees buckling like a bridge, my arms shaking to much to catch another one of my mothers crash landings.
None of us were left standing, we were all falling through the cracks, falling until we hit the floor of her room that night. This is what rock bottom must look like. The nurse disconnecting her machines, our hands stretching to reach a part of her as we wail, our tears dropping as fast as her heartbeat, our sanity vanishing with her breath.

Faster it faded, my step-father stroking her face.
Faster it faded, my father pressing her hand to his cheek.
Faster is faded, we’re still waiting on a miracle.
Faster it faded, my face planted to my mothers belly “mommy this hurts.”
Faster it faded, and then it was finished.
The monitors dropped to zero, and as her breath emptied and her heartbeat slowed, her fiancé removes the ring from her finger, ties it to his necklace and says “How fitting. It was her heart that was the last to go.”

It was silent after that.

Silence as my mother reaches over to shut her daughters eyes. My step-father releases a long awaited sigh. My sibling straighten the creases in her blanket, while my father unravels the rosary from her hands. Takes the prayer cards from behind her neck, and slips them into his pocket. Places a kiss on her forehead, her chest, and both her shoulders.

“Put in a good word to God for us.” He says.

And thats when I knew: that all along we had failed to see the light at the end of this tunnel she was going through. Because while we were praying for her awakening, the awakening was really meant for us. to remind us that life is a coma we can still choose to wake up from. That faith means not having to wait for the sun to come, because sometimes the sun doesn’t come. But we can still rise on our own. Her last breath has already blown life into the candles of our bones, with nothing more than a wish for us to live more fully.

The wooly caterpillar freezes to death in the winter and comes back to life in the spring. For 14 years it goes through the same cycle of awakening. waiting until the final year when it;s work is complete and it spins itself into a cocoon to be reborn a moth and fly away for good.
So sleep now, sweet sister.

You’ve surrendered your life for too many winters. We’ll take it from here. Sleep now and wherever you wake may you be reborn with wings on your back. Fly into the sun and know that when our own winters end, spring will come and we’ll see each other again. So until then,

Yeah, put in a good word to God for us.