Looking Away

Dema and I were friends and colleagues for ten years. In our roles with the Association of Program Directors in Internal Medicine and the Association of Professors of Medicine, we interacted often on a professional level. We enjoyed each other's company, sitting together at conferences or barbecuing on Sunday afternoons, celebrating my marriage, or rejoicing at her grandchildren. When our associations formed the Alliance for Academic Internal Medicine, we became coworkers. A few days after a series of meetings we both attended in May 2002, Dema collapsed at home. Doctors discovered that her cancer—which she had been battling for two years—had metastasized from breast to brain to lung to bone. I visited Dema during her last few months, and these visits made me understand decline for the first time in my life. Other than my father who had died a decade before, Dema was the closest person I have lost. Dema C. Daley died July 28, 2002. Because of my inexperience with death—and since we saw each other at least five days a week—losing Dema affected me profoundly. Turning to poetry for consolation, I contemplated friendship, mortality, and the afterlife through the writings of favorite poets, such as William (Bill) H. Heyen. Bill is an English professor and Poet in Residence at the State University of New York College at Brockport, where Dema worked before becoming executive director of the Association of Program Directors in Internal Medicine. In thinking about Dema, I turned to Bill's poetry because they were colleagues before she and I were; also, he knows life in western New York as well as he understands pain. I found Bill's poem “Looking Away”—from Pterodactyl Rose: Poems of Ecology—especially consoling while I grieved for Dema. In the poem, the speaker's wife is dying, and she is turning away from her husband, distancing herself for what is about to come. Her husband, too, distances himself when he returns from an evening out and instead of facing his sick wife, he instead checks on an oak sapling in the yard. The poem takes place in Brockport, New York, located on the Erie Canal between Rochester and Buffalo, about ten miles south of Lake Ontario, not far from where Dema lived when she worked at the State University of New York. In the first stanza, the speaker describes his “Brockport acre” and establishes a newly sprouted oak as a touchstone that requires nurturing and space “until it doesn't need me.” By the end of the poem, the speaker has linked his wife to the tree and his feelings have evolved from denial and anger at his wife's condition to acceptance and calm. This acceptance is underscored by a gentle action in the third stanza of floating “these words and look away” as compared to a violent one in the first stanza: “I drove a stake beside it.” In between, the speaker moves from describing his circumstance of arriving home late “from a waste of drinking and talk” to perceiving beyond it looking towards “a silver aura.” The poem ends in resolution: “And now, for once, beyond reason, /the mourning voices of doves in the oak's leaves, and peace.” There are similarities in the speaker's struggles in the poem with my own grief over Dema's death. Both the speaker and I see the “marginal diffusion of grasses and goldenrod,” while I still contemplate Dema's empty desk. The poem ends on a peaceful note, but those of us who were close to Dema still grieve. She was buried in Albion, a few miles west of Brockport. Many of us traveled to western New York, and we celebrated Dema's life with her family and friends among the “prayer-wheels/of the several churches” along the town's Main Street. Tod Ibrahim, MLA

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