In Their Own Words
Susan Briante on “What Comes After Us”
What Comes After Us
I stalled at the stoplight, imagined old rivers raging.
The quarry contracted. Not much more to carry.
My father sped ahead, in the back
of a white medical van strapped
in his hospital gown, his headlights
scalpeling through snow, a thin blanket
across his lap in the cold. No light
from the west, but a glow from the hospital garage.
And my car could not follow him.
Tonight the Geminids radiate from Castor
in the east, trees bare except for seed pod. We can’t know
what comes after us. I can’t pray to my father’s god.
Pray for my father, pray for the dead
leaves clinging to the sycamore. I am trying
to sit with death, receipts rustling at the roots
of a parking lot tree. After we go, will it have been enough
to have recorded the ember-teal of dawn? The juiced up
autumn leaves? Enough to hear wrens
flick their notes to the breeze, my father’s complaints
on the phone. Enough to promise to come home
while I stayed away, while a dark sky curved above me?
There’s a poem that would say YES but I can’t write it
Fuck the medical van slurring through the suburban dusk
four months before my father’s death,
highway gnawing my hometown’s edge, afternoons
staggering to bed. We can’t know what comes for us.
Fuck the care coordinator, the nursing home’s shitty care,
my father’s medical debts. Fuck the hospital’s think blanket,
the parking garage lights stealing sunset.
From 13 Questions for the Next Economy (Noemi Press, 2025). Reprinted with the permission of the author.
On “What Comes After Us”
My mother died in October 2014, at the age of 76, 14 months after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. My father died in June 2018 at the age of 80 after violently retching blood in the ER. He, too, had been diagnosed with cancer, although we don’t know what finally killed him. Working-class kids raised in cold water flats who stepped firmly into the middle class, you would probably use the phrase “good lives” to describe theirs. But despite all the relative fortune their privilege, luck, and hard work afforded them in a racist / classist/ capitalist system, they suffered awful deaths: months of pain and humiliation at the hands of a for-profit health system.
To age in the United States is to witness the body become an exploitable resource: tossed from hospitals with fresh wounds, offered treatments that kill instead of palliative care. The elderly patient becomes a pit-mined mountainside, a mouth agape with morphine. You remember what was once forest, a granite face pinking at sunset. You can almost make out the words he would have said.
In one of our last phone calls, my father complained. 8 pills this morning, he slurred. I don’t even know what I am taking. We talked about a new doctor, a better “rehab” center.
That was before COVID, before healthcare worker shortages and hospital shutdowns. Before we were all made to pay more to drink from a poisoned well. It’s no surprise that one of the most popular and populist acts of recent political violence involved the murder of a health insurance company executive. It’s no surprise my poem turned angry. It’s for my parents, and for all of those who will not be as lucky they were.
