Psychotherapist

Once a week Dr. Borrisov flies
Boston-Newark for a day of teaching.
 
Never mind that she’s eighty-nine.
She loves her work. This is how she lives.
 
When her life ends, it’s swift. Two nights
she paces the corridors of Bloomvale Home.
 
She stops at her own door, looks in, walks on.
Farewell to furniture. To future. The surgeon
 
poopoos her worry. ‘Only last week’, he says,
‘I removed a tumour from a man of ninety-four.’
 
But Dr. Borrisov does not recover.
Her daughter passes on her lumbar pillow
 
to Professor Charles on the floor below.
For years he takes the pillow everywhere
 
until, like Dr. Borrisov, one day it disappears.
 

Joan Michelson

published in Intima Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine,
Autumn 2015, www.theintima.org;
in collection Bloomvale Home, 2016, original plus,
ISBN 978-0-9931186-8-5