Death Came for a Visit

Poetry: November, 2025

Part I

Death came into my father’s hospital room for a visit.

He slinked into the room like a wisp of fog

that snakes around rocks and hovers above the pond.

His black eyes observed my father

with watchful understanding and patience.

His slender fingers floated through the air

as if they themselves could sense my father’s readiness

like a barometer predicts an incoming storm.

He floated,

intent on my father as though no one else was in the room,

and we weren’t really, 

It was only he and my father,

beginning a dance set to music only they could hear. 

But I could sense him.

He was in my father‘s words,

“I think it’s time to give up”

and in his eyes, heavy with acceptance

and slightly cloudy as though he were looking past all of us

to something beckoning him from the beyond.

It was in my mother’s hands,

as she instinctively reached out to him in the hospital bed

and touched him on the arm

with a grip she prayed could keep him bound to his body

and here with us.

I saw it in the eyes of the doctor and nurses,

as their brows furrowed,

recognizing the presence of their nemesis

and looked wearily and with trepidation

toward the loss of another battle.

Death came for a brief visit,

then left as swiftly as he had come,

as though called to another hospital room,

where his attendance was more pressingly required.

I know he will return

as my father’s dance has just begun. 

We just don’t know how many songs will play

before the end.

Part II

Death came again.

He’s been watching from afar,

too far away for me to notice him,

but tonight he entered the house.

He’s now staying in the shadows of this very room,

in the dark corners where his dull black eyes

blend into the nothingness.

But I know he’s there.

He’s not in my father’s moans,

or his incoherent babbling.

He’s not in his clutching hands

that reach out for something I can’t provide.

He’s not in my mother’s cracking voice

as she acknowledges she has reached her limit,

“I can’t do this.”

Instead I see death in the stillness of my father’s chest

in between his ragged breaths.

I hear him in the ticking clock

that marks the seconds of my father’s transition.

Soon my father will slip and fall

and it will only be Death who can catch him.

I hope his grasp is gentle

and feels like home.

Part III

He now sits on the edge of my father’s bed,

waiting,

Holding my father’s hand,

which must be why it’s so cold.

His closer presence has calmed my father,

taken away the panic, the hallucinations.

Or is that the morphine?

Death reaches out his slender fingers

and rests them briefly on my father’s brow

as he peers at him with curiosity,

Anticipating the feeling of this new soul in his arms

as he carries him into eternity.

Part IV

Death is gone.

His final presence was felt in the hospice nurse’s prayer

over my father’s body,

In the long pauses in between

my father’s final ragged breaths,

In the faces of the family who stood vigil

during the last moments,

In the gentle and caring hands of the morticians

who gently wrapped his body in a white shroud,

In the emptiness of the room

that now contains no visitors,

no body,

no family,

just an empty hospital bed

that will soon be picked up and taken away as well.

Death has enticed my father’s soul away

with his soothing, seductive whispers,

and graceful hands,

With promises of rest

and the love of those

who he has already taken away. 

And now my father is free.