Issue #100: “Death in the Family!”
Issue #100: “Death in the Family!”
This is it: the tearjerker issue. The death of Young Man’s father.
The moment loyal fans have been writing and blogging about.
“What happened?” they all ask. “Was Young Man there?
How monumentally did he fight? What about the other heroes?
Young Man’s sisters? Young Man’s friends? The entire League
of Heroics? Where were they? The whole League had to be there
helping to fight the good fight when Father finally succumbed
to that arch fiend, Death!” But this issue turns the world
on its ear. No grand battles. No speeches. No friends. No enemies.
Only our hero, Young Man, out of costume, sitting at Father’s bedside.
This whole issue is completely silent. No dialogue balloons.
No thought bubbles. Only our hero, bedside, gently
stroking Father’s brow as, page after page, Father lies in a dream
of morphine. His eyes are closed—dark, bulbous walnuts
in the sockets of his skull. He is a gaunt, desert cadaver.
His body trembles. Small, slowing ripples of the flesh.
Page after page, Father winds down like a child’s toy.
And our hero—in college at this point, honing his super powers
into razor sharp sonnets, thunderous sestinas, free verse
like raging rivers, all at his command—our hero, sits powerless
at Father’s bedside, whispering, again and again, in an ever
lowering voice, “It’s okay…it’s okay…it’s okay.”
“But does he mean it?” our readers will ask. “Have they truly
reconciled? Were they finally on speaking terms again before
this moment? Does Father have any cryptic or resolving last words?
Does our hero?” But the issue is silent. Just soft, frail pages
of Young Man sitting at his father’s bedside as the life extinguishes.
The final page, the final page is a dead page, entirely black
…only, in the very corner, almost invisible, as if in a dream, are the words:
It’s okay…it’s okay…it’s all okay.
*This poem appears in Chautauqua
Taken from “…hide behind me…”
click to hear me read this poem
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