though you were mostly gone,
every breath a great labor,

I thought of others who,
before liftoff, with great effort,

forced their parched lips to say
to those assembled:

I love you. You mean the world
to me. Thank you for being here.

You girls are the best things
that ever happened to me.

And as we watched, as we’d
been doing for days, I knew we

would not hear so much as a
whisper from you. Not merely

because you were past speech,
or that you had already traveled

beyond us into mystery, but also
because those were not your words.

And I wondered if, in the after—
if there is, indeed, an after—

you might have wished that
you had looked at the daughters

you bore—whom you must have
fussed over when we were babies,

whose fine hair you twirled between
your young fingers, who must have

watched us brand new beings sleep,
ones who had come through you—

if something in you, as you lifted on
the wings you’d grown, might have

wished for us to hear the words
that you could never say in life:

I love you. You mean the world
to me. Thank you for being here.

You girls are the best things
that ever happened to me.

And oh, that you heard us whisper,
Thankyouthankyouthankyou

for our lives, for all that you gave us.
You did good, Ma—you did well.

Yes, we love you, though we often
found it hard to do, even harder

to tell you, and somehow—
though we cannot know for sure—

we trust that you loved us, too.