I'm ugly. Is it my fault?

"Now everything smells.
The piss in the pot beside my bed,
my powdered feet that I can't reach,
my metal chair. The woman who used it last
died and left her smell."

It's hard to understand the view from the hospice bed. Can we say that we've been given less than six months to live? Can we feel the humiliation of being completely dependent on others for care? Can we understand the feeling of being trapped by diagnosis, trapped by strangers, trapped by a body that just... dies?

In an anthology of poems about old women titled Only Morning in Her Shoes, I found Susan Fantl Spivack's poem, "I'm ugly. Is it my fault?" This poem shares the mind of an old woman who is in hospice care. She details an existence where a soul snarls against unchangeable circumstances.

At some point in our lives, we all think about our mortality. We fantasize about heroic deaths, cringe at horror movie endings, imagine what the world might be without us.

I find that this poem focuses attention on something we only imagine and usually shudder to think about. There are reasons why many people are leery of hospices. It brings us too close to our own mortality, the possibility that we too could one day be trapped by the same metal railings, doomed to die in a place were strangers with strange and terminal illnesses are recycled through as the bedsheets change. Hospices are nothing like our greatest fantasies and most horrible horror movies. This poem gives voice to the grit, the truth of an old woman in a place where dreams and nightmares have often perished in reality.