I Only Know Jimmy Because

he waves whenever I walk by. He lives four blocks away, and he lets the neighbor dogs poop in his yard. He lets mine. That says all you need to know about him, or all I need to know. To say it’s okay for an animal to crap on your lawn is to say we all have needs and can’t always manage the timing, is to say sometimes it’s best to start with forgiveness, as Jimmy always does, is to say that to allow something to happen as it’s meant to is easier than trying to stop it. Jimmy’s mother paid her bills last week. That’s what Jimmy tells me after I put on my funeral home sweater set and black slacks and drive to work and stand in the lobby across from him just after he’s arrived for his mother’s visitation. It’s the most I’ve ever talked to him. It’s the most I can do right now. His mother paid her bills all on her own, he says, and she had just seen the cardiologist a few days ago and her blood pressure couldn’t be better, her heart beat the right number of times and thumped correctly, which is to say Jimmy was caught off guard when his mother slipped from the bed. He called 911 and the ambulance roared her to the hospital. She didn’t last long. Jimmy stands there, his hands fiddling the air as he tells me his story, which most people want to do, of the one he loved and how he lost her, how he didn’t see it coming. Do any of us see what is coming? The windows of this lobby are wide and tall, taking in the whole of the parking lot and the streets and that intersection—a four-way stop—that you must go through to get here. This, the place of stop and go. This, the place of goodbye. This, the place where Jimmy tells me the story that will become his most important story yet while all the light pours in, as do the coming hours and days, unwilling to halt, unwilling to be managed by anyone, unwilling to do anything but ask our forgiveness for what they take from us, for what they leave behind. 

Shuly Xóchitl Cawood runs writing workshops, doodles with watercolors and metallic pencils, and is raising two poodles and a dwindling number of orchids. She is the author of six books, including What the Fortune Teller Would Have Said (winner of the Iron Horse Literary Review Chapbook Competition) and The Going and Goodbye (a memoir in essays). Her forthcoming title is I Am Trying to Love the World (Press 53, 2027). Learn more about Shuly at shulycawood.com.     

This essay first appeared in Brevity #81 (2026).