The Fight to the Finish

 The Fight to the Finish

People ask me how things are going

and I feel like I’ve said ad nauseum,

“It feels like she could pass at any moment

and that I’ve said that for 3 days straight.”

Here’s the honest truth:

The body is created to live.

Add to that my mom’s Spanish blood

and you’ve got yourself a prize fight

with the God-awful undertaker.

 

I’ve spoken freely about mom’s spirit,

her regenerated heart filled with God’s Spirit,

but her old man, her human nature,

has the composition of a honeybadger,

diehard as Bruce Willis,

bravehearted as William Wallace,

she has a never-say-die will inside her.

 

As much as she longed for heaven

in a more conscious state of mind,

her whole being is clinging to earth

with the brazen grip of Guinevere

in her unconscious state of being.

Which is something you also

need to know about my mom:

Philena is a Fighter.

 

Her life wasn’t a primrose path 

and her past wasn’t free from trauma,

she knew hardship and heartache

which turned her into a survivor,

one of the fittest and finest I know.

She wasn’t sweet because of ease,

her peace was hard-fought—grueling.

 

So as I watch her inborn genetics kick in

I’m introduced to the little girl 

who was the daughter of a streetfighter

scraping on the docks of New York City—

Al Lavin, the passionate Spaniard,

immigrant to the melting pot of the Big Apple—

She comes from gritty stock,

a sticker and a stayer at heart.

 

Her innate will to live is fighting now.

We are witnessing our biological mom,

not our theological mom,

Nor the soul-surrendered mom,

But the indomitable, unsubduable mom

more akin to the prophetess, Deborah,

The women warrior of whom it was said,

 

“In the days of Shamgar son of Anath, 

the highways were abandoned;

travelers took to winding paths.

Villagers in Israel would not fight;

They held back until, I, Deborah,

arose, until I arose, a mother in Israel.”

 

We are eye-witnesses of this inner strength,

she will not go down without a fight.

She will not gentle into that good night—

and you know what? I wouldn’t want her to.