for Julia Ellen Cook,
July 15, 1916–May 9, 1998

Honey, she’d say,
in a voice that still comes to me
waking and dreaming,

Honey, you have to choose to stay.
You just can’t leave.

I was 22 and 100 pounds and passing out for no
apparent reason—waking up on the floor of the studio
apartment tucked next to the garage on Serenity Hills Drive.

No reason other than perhaps the stress of a job I loved
and devoted nearly every breath to. That and surviving
mostly on Dr Pepper and M&Ms with the occasional
cheeseburger.

She was my landlady in the big house up the hill—
the woo-woo, new age, holistic nurse with fiery hair
who shaved a decade off her age, who said things like,
You can leave your body, honey, but only when
you’re asleep, dreaming, or awake meditating.

Huh, I thought. OK.

She taught me to meditate, though I’d watched my mother
do so for years, sitting with me in the big pink recliner
built for two, teaching me to calm my breathing, to let
thoughts run through my brain without chasing them
like a flitting hummingbird, waiting until behind my closed
eyes deep violets and indigos pulsed like expanding
waves rolling into shore.

She fed me stews and broccoli, soups and homemade
sourdough bread, made sure I had access at all hours
to both full kitchen and washing machine in the big house.
Honey, you’re a gift, she’d tell me. You’re meant to be here.

And, she said, as I meditated, every day, I was to think,
very hard, I’m staying. I’m staying.

You never decided to stay in your body, she said.
You have to decide to stay and mean it.

I knew the story of my mother finding me blue
in my crib, picking me up and whacking the breath
back into me.

I’m staying, I’d think as I interviewed people
for the newspaper, as I typed up stories, as I
laid out long galleys of waxed words on big
pages at the slanted wood tables.

I’m staying, I’d think, as I explored the town
with its onion smell that embraced me, as I found
myself enveloped in the arms of a new lover.

And years later, as she was dying, as I sat by her bedside—
Honey, I need you to be a witness to the process—
I reminded her of the mantra she’d given me.

Now you’re going, I told her.

There are no accidents, honey, she said. You’re staying.

I did. And I am. Staying, carrying forward
what she gave me, decade into decade,
in every meditation, every breath,
with my grateful heart.

***

You can listen to Jan read this poem here.