“What do we do now?” my mother asks,
sitting where my grandmother used to sit
at the kitchen table. Her siblings have joined her,
their four chairs cardinal points on a newly restored
compass. They think we, the six grandchildren,
can’t hear them now that they have sent us
to the living room to play Clue and watch the Red Sox.
But their voices are approaching thunder
to our listening hearts, which are soft and unripened
even though we have lost before and our ages range
from sixteen to thirty.

It doesn’t help that none of us are speaking.
Maybe the TV play-by-play has lulled us
into nine innings of respite. Or, maybe my brother
and four cousins are still caught in the riptide
of last night, just as I am. Eighteen hours have passed,
but I could swear the words “She’s gone, she’s at peace”
have just left my father’s mouth, and the wise little girl
inside me has only begun crying and reminding him
of what she already knows: There’s nothing peaceful
about funerals and wills and last good-byes.
There’s nothing peaceful about the husk of you
that’s left when grief shucks you dry.
There’s nothing peaceful about looking out the window
at a world unchanged and indifferent to
this familial seismic shift.

This time, though, it’s not death that quakes me.
Cancer rarely kills by stealth anymore.
This time, it’s the ashfall voices in the other room
and the knowledge of where their speakers sit.
This time, it’s the unspoken inheritance
that will come in twenty, thirty years,
when my brother and I will find ourselves
in our own kitchen chairs, asking the same question
my mother asked today and accepting crowns
that will have already begun to flicker.

– Sara Letourneau

Author’s Note: I wrote the first draft of “Head of the Table” after my last surviving grandparent (my maternal grandmother) passed away in 2014. The strange thing is, as I was writing this poem, memories from when my grandfather (my grandmother’s husband) passed away crept in. So the result isn’t so much an exact description of what happened in 2014. Rather, it’s an amalgamation of past and then-present images, thoughts, and emotions that highlight the themes I wanted to discuss better than an exact “play-by-play” ever would have. It’s not just a poem about loss, family, and grief. It’s a poem about the terrifying moment when you realize that your parents’ generation has become the matriarchs and patriarchs of the family, and how much closer everyone you love has inched toward their own mortality.