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83–Like a tiger in the bush.

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83–Like a tiger in the bush.

Some days I experienced my father’s decline with the equanimity of a monk, and other days with the fury of a tiger.

Joey Rubin
Jul 30, 2023
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83–Like a tiger in the bush.

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Among all the softer emotions we feel walking a person through their last weeks, there are also many sharp feelings, ugly feelings, misshapen feelings that visit us—with anger being a regular presence.

And no surprise: for what is fair about death? The way it comes for some people quickly, without warning, or the way it stalks others like a tiger in the bush? Or the way, like that same tiger, it plays with some to the bitter end, until the last pulses of energy are released from a weakened body and put back into the world?

Some days I experienced my father’s decline with the equanimity of a monk, and others, I clenched my jaw and ground my teeth and cursed the cruelty of his unfair fate. Some days I watched the tiger—others I was the tiger.

Here, in this poem, I am angry. His brain, crowded out by the tumor, has begun to forfeit basic functions, and I am tasked with putting him in a diaper.

Anger isn’t bad or unwelcome. It too is part of the door-to-door mess we call human life. The tiger’s victim is just as physical as the tiger; a being taken apart by the thrusting violence of an unchosen darkness. We must respect the tiger, but we can also curse it.


Dad, making the last of his art, 2018.

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