My mother said

        My mother said, "Of course,
it may be nothing, but your father
        has a spot on his lung."
That was all she said. My father
        at fifty-one could never
speak of dreadful things without tears.
        When I started home,
I kissed his cheek, which was not our habit.
        In a letter, my mother
asked me not to kiss him again
        because it made him sad.
In two weeks, the exploratory
        revealed an inoperable
lesion.
            The doctors never
        told him, he never asked,
but read The Home Medical Guidebook.
        Seven months later,
just after his fifty-second birthday
        -- his eyesight going,
his voice reduced to a whisper, three days
        before he died -- he said,
"If anything should happen to me . . ."

Donald Hall, found in Good Poems, Garrison Keillor, ed (Viking, 2002)