ALT The Last Hard Years of Love I wanted the end to be of my own making, the way my friend Stanley, whose nickname was Slumpie, took a rope and tied it to his neck, or Kelly who took a jar of pills, to be an elegy at the edge of one’s breath. But I wanted to go, before my mind went, the way my grandmother’s mind turned to milk, the way I watch my parents and my in-laws fade, no I wanted to go. To drive out to the lake and say a prayer and have it done. I wanted to be no one, and yet the older I get I now want time to slow, to take in all we have to bear. To listen to every stutter in my father’s speech and hold it like a comma in the air. And even after he is gone, and after I have shoveled the last bit of dirt, I want to stand an orphan and go on, not for myself, but to tell of the lives they lived, the love they gave, the way we’d walk holding hands under the blue neon of Brooklyn streets, or climb the Camden mountain side by side, the years my mother worked sending music on the air