Death Trips by VA Wiswill

     Ben Grey CC



Death Trips

    When my grandfather passed, blade-thin, after months spent gasping for a teaspoon of air, my mother told me the truth, “Dying is hard,” she said. “Watching it happen is even harder to endure.” 

    Decades later, trailing a wisp of smoke I wasn’t ready to watch drift away, I understood she was right.

    I called them Death Trips, not to anyone or even out loud—my solo journeys across black winter water. Waves cresting before breaking into a thousand tears against the ferry’s bow. White-knuckled driving, guided to the bleak truth of my destination by trees and rain.

    Two hours later, sodden with apprehension, I’d exit my car. 

    Inside my mother’s building, death raided my senses. The unique smell of food cooked in an institution. The silence forced into every space. The incorrect tilt of her head as she lay in bed, slightly too sharp to be natural. 

    Death was the absence consuming her room—the desperation of four walls splattered with memories.

     “This is us trying,” my sister said, slamming the nails into the plaster on the day our mother moved in. 

    The photos might as well have been black-marker faces for all the good they did. 

    Death was the loneliness of being with her, of watching her gaze drift to an empty corner before wordlessly asking me an impossible-to-answer question. 

    “I don’t know,” I’d want to say. “When it’s time. When you’re ready.” 


    A month later, on my last trip, my mother barely a wrinkle in the covers of her bed; I saw him, what she’d seen all along, her ferryman, tucked in the corner of her room, patiently awaiting the inevitable. His presence shuffled the air, split my spine, and opened a crevasse of shivers. Traveling up and out, one burst from my mouth. 

    “Go,” it said, holding my mother’s faded eyes. “It’s time.”

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VA lives outside Seattle, WA, with her human and animal family. Her work has appeared in The Lake, 34th Parallel Magazine, Sad Girls Literary Magazine, Ignatian Literary Magazine, OJA & L Magazine, Front Porch Review, Five on the Fifth, Lumina Journal, and Panoplyzine Magazine as the Editors’ Poem of Choice. She has work forthcoming in Crab Creek Review, Spry Literary Magazine, The Basilisk Tree, and Figwort.
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You can find her on Instagram at @vawiswell and www.vawiswell.com.

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