photo by Lara Herscovitch

Our Lady of the Daffodils
         for Tanisha Brunson-Malone

Every day now she inhales their fresh scent,
pays the familiar florists in twenties,
cradles the yellow massed in her arms
bursting brightly before her blue scrubs.

In the parking lot, behemoth trailers wait,
loudly droning their refrigerator motors –
beasts to bear the bodies of newly dead
to funeral homes before burial.

In the morgue, she’s always seen corpses
but never this number, this carnage overflow
day upon day, week upon week of traffic
rolling in on stretchers, then out to trucks.

She enters a truck’s aisle from loading dock –
fresh printout of names for this makeshift morgue,
white body bags stacked on shelves three high.
At each one she pauses, places a bloom –

because ‘it’s the right thing to do’ –
her gesture to acknowledge the lives
that have died alone, passed so swiftly,
and a way to ease her own lonely grief.

*****

My husband and I live in downtown New Haven, very close to Yale New Haven Hospital. At 7:00 pm folks in our building come out onto our balconies and bang on pots to honor first responders and hospital workers.

We often hear the sirens and helicopters. We are social distancing. I distributed masks made by a quilting friend to all staff and some residents in our apartment building. My husband has been ‘seeing’ his patients via Facetime. We mask when we leave our apartment and when we return to the lobby and elevators. We walk early in the morning when very few people are about, masks at the ready for any encounters. I grocery shop once a week at 6:00am in mask and gloves. I continue to work with the non-profit boards I serve on. Meetings, book and poetry groups have been on Zoom. I talk with our children, grandchildren, friends and colleagues on the phone, and sporadically write journal entries about these pandemic days.

And I write poems. I find writing helpful during these difficult days. Dismayed at the way we must keep a six-foot distance from each other, I wrote this haiku:

Distance dance now
Bodies veer, curve and swerve
Resisting all closeness.

Usually, I like my poems to speak for themselves, no explanation. But the one above – Our Lady of the Daffodils – is an exception.

Tanisha Brunson-Malone is a forensic technician at Hackensack University Medical Center’s hospital morgue. She performs autopsies on those who have died, and oversees body “pickups” by funeral homes.

I read about her in The New York Times on May 7. Since March, when the bodies of the dead started to appear in overwhelming numbers and without the nearby presence of their loved ones, Ms. Brunson-Malone has gone almost every day to the Flower Exchange in Paramus, NJ. She buys daffodils and brings them back to work. She walks the aisles of huge refrigerator trailers, pausing at each body stored and stacked on shelves three feet high. Between each of the rows, she carefully places a flower on top of each person, to acknowledge and honor them.

As written in The Times, “Ms. Brunson-Malone’s gesture is all but invisible, seen by only some colleagues and the funeral home workers who arrive to claim bodies. Her flowers are for the dead alone, a fleeting brush with dignity and decorum on the way from one sad place to another.” The florists were so touched when they realized why she kept buying masses of daffodils that they gave her a discount.

I was deeply moved by her generous and loving gesture and act, so specific in honoring the dead. I wrote this poem to honor her, communicate what her goodness meant to me amidst the rampant fear and grief.

She reminds me that humanity and kindness will see us through.

-Laura Altshul [1941–2024]

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