Saying Goodbye

 I started this post a million years ago.

Ok, not a million years, but a long time ago, probably May.

And I kept looking at it sitting there in the draft folder. Taunting me.

I feel like grief is all around me. All the time. Like a pack of wolves hunting down my soul.

I should try to readjust my attitude about grief. I SHOULD not be afraid of it. I should welcome it into my house and ask it if it wants to stay a while. But I don't have my own house, that's another story for another time, so, yeah, no visitors.

As a result of this game of chicken I have with grief, it roars into my life sometimes like a motorcycle gang disrupting my pretending that every thing is alright.

Last week was the week leading up to the anniversary of my brother's death. 8 years. 

EIGHT YEARS?! How does that even happen?

And I was shoveling food and stomping around until I realized the 19th was just around the corner.

UGH.

Knowing it was going to be a rough one no matter what I did, I tried to plan a quiet weekend with lots of walking by myself.

It would have worked, too, if the stars had not aligned to take RBG from our world on the 18th.

I am trying REALLY hard, after days of sulking, to think FIRST of the tremendous gift it was to have her in our world for so long. But, I fail, often, and slink back into the terrible hole her loss has created in our world. 

Saying goodbye is hard - and this has been a rough year for everyone - and I am only human.

I started this draft (a million years ago) because I THOUGHT, maybe this is the year that grief won't be so hard. 

I was wrong, or grief is horrible, or 2020 sucks. Or all of that is true.

I am going to have a weekend away - and I haven't had any time to worry about the ramifications of interacting with people (masked, of course) because I have been all wrapped up in this grief. So, maybe not having time to be anxious is a silver lining?

I am trying, I swear.

Not Poetry Thursday, for Greg

Hummingbird
 ~Robin Becker

I love the whir of the creature come
to visit the pink
flowers in the hanging basket as she does

most August mornings, hours away
from starvation to store
enough energy to survive overnight.

The Aztecs saw the refraction
of incident light on wings
as resurrection of fallen warriors.

In autumn, when daylight decreases
they double their body weight to survive
the flight across the Gulf of Mexico.

On next-to-nothing my mother
flew for 85 years; after her death
she hovered, a bird of bones and air.

Copyright © 2017 Robin Becker. Used with permission of the author.

This, too, is grief

When you lose someone you love, you expect grief. 

Ok, maybe you don't have a full grasp of how grief will be like a tidal wave until it isn't - and sometimes still because it cuts you at your knees or sucker punches you in the gut when you least expect it.

But grief as desperately wrenching as it is in its rawest form - that deep hole in your heart, is not only sadness and anguish.

Of course, everyone has heard of the stages of grief, which by the way were meant to describe a patient coming to terms with her/his own death not that of those bereaved. There is anger. There is denial. All of that along side, in between and at disparate times with the sadness and anguish.

I cannot speak to acceptance - unless you are talking about finally agreeing that your loved one is, indeed, dead - as in not coming back. Maybe. But I think lots of people forestall denial by assuming that they will be reunited at some point in the future or the after world. As I do not hold on to that hope, my denial did have to come to an end - but it lasted a good, long time - when I still saw my sister from the corner of my eye, driving by, escaping death even if it meant abandoning us as well.

But grief is also the aftermath.

This is the part that I don't think people talk about.

It has been a horrible place for me - and I imagine that it is for others as well.

Your life is reconfigured. You are told about the new normal when people can be honest about the fact that it does not get better, just different.

But I was wholly unprepared for the devastation that has been the aftermath in my family.

It's not like a war torn landscape with craters were there used to be houses. That seems so bleak and drastic ... but, sometimes, it really does feel that way.

Poetry Thursday, life right now for a lot of people

Every Verb is a Lesson in Longing or Dread

~April Freely

Dear Reader, it wouldn’t be a lie if you said poetry was a cover

for my powerlessness, here, on this plane

having ticked off another day waiting for her diagnosis to rise.

As the air pressure picks up, I feel the straight road

curved by darkness, where the curve is a human limit,

where the second verb is mean, the second verb is to blind.

On the other line, my mother sits on her bed

after a terrible infection. Her voice like a wave

breaking through the receiver, when she tells me

that unlike her I revel in the inconclusivity of the body.

+

At the end of the line, I know my mother

accumulates organ-shaped pillows after surgery.

First a heart, then lungs.

The lung pillow is a fleshy-pink. The heart

pillow, a child-drawn metaphor. Both help her expectorate

the costs to the softer places of her body.

After each procedure they make her cross,

the weight of the arm comes down. These souvenirs

of miraculous stuffing other patients on the transplant floor covet,

the way one might long for a paper sack doll made by hand.

Though the stuffing is just wood shavings, one lies

with the doll tight at the crick of an elbow at night.

Copyright © 2020 by April Freely. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 29, 2020 by the Academy of American Poets.

not Poetry Thursday

The Time Machine
~Laura Kasischke

My mother begged me: Please, please, study
stenography...

Without it
I would have no future, and this

is the future that was lost in time to me

having scoffed at her, refusing
to learn the only skill I’d ever need, the one

I will associate forever now with loss, with her
bald head, her wig, a world
already gone
by the time we had this argument, while

our walls stayed slathered in its pale green.
While we
wore its sweater sets. While we
giddily picked the pineapple
off our hams with toothpicks. Now

I’m lost somewhere between
1937
and 1973. My

time machine, blown off course, just
as my mother knew it would be.

Oh, Mama: forget about me.
You don’t have to forgive
me, but know this, please:

I am
the Stenographer now.
I am
the Secretary you wanted me to be.  I am

the girl who gained the expertise you
knew some day some man would need.

Too late, maybe.
(Evening.)
I’m sick, I think.
You’re dead.
I’m weak.

“And now I’m going to tell you
a little secret.
Get your pen and steno-pad, and sit
down across from me.”

Ready?

The grieving:

It never ends.

You learn a million
tricks, memorize
the symbols &
practice the techniques

and still you wake up every morning
lost inside your
lost machine. Confused, but always
on a journey.

Disordered.

Cut short.

Still moving.

Keep speaking
Mama.
Please.
I’m taking it down
so quickly, so

quickly, even

(perhaps especially)

when I appear

not to be.

I do this naturally.

See? So

naturally
that in the end
no training was ever needed.

None at all.
None at all.

I taught myself so well.

It’s all I can do now.

Copyright © 2017 Laura Kasischke. Used with permission of the author.

Poetry Thursday, May...

To Theodore
 ~George Marion McClellan

Such are the little memories of you;
They come and go, return and lie apart
From all main things of life; yet more than they,
With noiseless feet, they come and grip the heart.
Gay laughter leading quick and stormy tears,
Then smiles again and pulse of flying feet,
In breathless chase of fleeting gossamers,
Are memories so dear, so bitter-sweet.

No more are echoes of your flying feet.
Hard by, where Pike’s Peak rears its head in state,
The erstwhile rushing feet, with halting steps,
For health’s return in Denver watch and wait.
But love and memories of noiseless tread,
Where angels hovered once, all shining fair,
To tuck you in your little trundle bed,
Kneel nightly now in agony of prayer.


I woke this morning thinking of my brother who would have been 59 next week. April is cruel and May is bittersweet... here we go again...

Poetry Thursday, for Chila

A Little Bit
 ~Eileen Myles

It’s a little bit
true that the
hole in my jacket
pocket
the breast pocket
yeah all relaxed
has a hole &
pens keep
slipping through
one’s in the lining
but this one
perched
now it’s a writing
bird
silly black out there
wants to
tell its
song. Miguel’s
book was
in the air &
I was on
a train
my feet are cold
and you wouldn’t
be in the
air so
long it doesn’t happen
like this
there’s no climate
in a plane
and I was in one
but not on
earth
my mother
is gone
each thing I do
is a little
bit wrong. I’m willing
to apologize
but they never
help it’s
just pointing
out the hole
& people
forget but I
won’t forget
you

Poetry Thursday

The Endless
~Timothy Donnelly

I saw a yellow butterfly
flying
in my opinion
the wrong way, flying across
the sound
to Connecticut

I saw a cormorant
oily-looking
flying
close to the sea’s surface
precisely
as I floated on it on

my back in
the attitude of the crucifixion
minerals in my body
in
conversation with
the minerals of the sea

about the sun
how can I possibly
add
to what’s already been said
so well
by the ancients

and said with
an austerity I’ll never
know
it is an honor to take
a backseat to the ancients
who knew how

I was a fat white fish
dissolving
under the sold-out stadium sun
like a god
but like a god
I could live through anything.

Poetry Thursday, hummingbirds and souls

Hummingbird

~Robin Becker

I love the whir of the creature come

to visit the pink

flowers in the hanging basket as she does

most August mornings, hours away

from starvation to store

enough energy to survive overnight.

The Aztecs saw the refraction

of incident light on wings

as resurrection of fallen warriors.

In autumn, when daylight decreases

they double their body weight to survive

the flight across the Gulf of Mexico.

On next-to-nothing my mother

flew for 85 years; after her death

she hovered, a bird of bones and air.

Copyright © 2017 Robin Becker. Used with permission of the author.

Poetry Thursday, Remembering Ben

Your heart 

and 

my heart 

are very, very 

old friends. 

~ Sufi Saying

Visiting Chila

This was the first time I hiked up to Chila's resting place by myself.  I was truly alone after this sign because my phone turned itself off in dramatic fashion.

I had to focus... on the sights and sounds and smells and temperature. It was lovely. Apparently, it was the day a million moths were born. They were swarming every where.

I was so focused on sounds, I kept hearing this little click, click, click. Finally, I spied a grasshopper, looked like still in baby stage, and I watched and listened to it move its body and make the click click click. 

There were so many beautiful wildflowers blooming ... hence the swarming moths.  As I approached Chila's place, I noticed these gorgeous flowers, like a morning glory but with a dark center. 

Turns out they are called catalina mariposa lilies.  I gathered a bunch and made a bouquet for Chila.

I went up to the rock and I had planned to sit there for a bit, but the plants around the rock were super overgrown and all in bloom.  

I stood there, listening to the wind and birds and bugs, and watching the landscape. 

I thought, where is she? Is she here?

Just as I was feeling sorry for myself and thinking she wasn't here with me, a hummingbird came up to me, she was about six inches from my face. She hovered there, and I acknowledged her and eventually she flew off. 

But then as I walked down the mountain, she buzzed me.  Then she sat on a tree and looked at me. I stood two feet from her and memorized her features so I could look it up in the bird book. 

As I kept walking, she moved to the next tree, this time, she positioned herself so that she could look right at me.  Finally she flew off. 

As I pulled out of the parking lot, I noticed a hummingbird again by my car.  She followed me down, half way to Uncle Louie's house.  

She was there... and she let me know. 

When I got home where my bird book was, I looked up the hummingbird and it was a female Anna's hummingbird...[or immature male, but I am preferring to think it was a female!]  You can see some photos here and here and here.

Poetry Thursday, Pops

Our greatest strength 
lies in the gentleness 
and tenderness 
of our heart.
 ~ Rumi

 I always considered myself lucky -- to have hit the jackpot in the dad lottery.  He is one of the most generous people I know, curious and interested in the world, willing to wonder and delve into questions and problems, and though he doesn't always show it, incredibly sensitive, especially to those who have less than he does.  And my dad always seemed to think that he had more than enough.

I like to tell the story of how he brought home the homeless guy because I was away for a year, so there was a whole empty room in the house! 

But I am also fond of telling the story how after I expressed an interest in morse code, that he bought three transmitters, mounted each on a board and then carved in the codes for the alphabet.  After we had all (my youngers and I) learned the codes, we'd sit around the dining room table (which we didn't use to eat from) and dit dah dit dah each other. Our transmitters were not actually connected to anything, so our messages just went out to the room, but we were happy.

As an adult, especially since my siblings passed, I have seen other sides of my pops, maybe seen some quirky aspects of his personality with the volume turned up.  I get frustrated with his penchant for the conspiracy theory and the negative outlook.  But I have learned to see that age can make folks feel vulnerable and powerless.  Growing old gracefully requires one to release our complete competency, and this is hard for my dad.  

I refuse to believe that his grumpy old man routine he gets caught up in sometimes is not his true nature.

Being an adult with my dad is not all bad.  He shares more with me than he used to.  And though it isn't always rainbows and puppies, more frequently it is fear and insecurity, I still appreciate these glimpses into his personality.

This past weekend, he was complaining because my mom didn't invite him to a garage sale she was going to with a girlfriend.  It is funny because she never wants to go with him to the thrift store or garage sale, but she still wants to be invited.  I reminded him that he often didn't want to go whenever she invited him places.  He was salty, grumpy old man style.

A bit later, mom arrived and apparently handed him a bag of goodies ... a gift from the garage sale. I was still working in the other room. My dad came over pleased as pie with his gift.  Look what your mom brought me! He beamed.  And he giggled, good thing she didn't know he had been complaining.

That is my dad... he might be feeling entitled to complain more than when I was younger, but he still is able to appreciate more than most.  

Happy birthday, Pops... love you very much. 

views from the road

I was in the train, briefly, and this was as close as I got to the beach on my short trip south.

Still it was lovely! I spent as much of the hour as possible checking for whale spouts. I didn't see any, but it was fun to be able to try.

I wish I had gotten at least one long walk by the water... next time.

Instead, the only forays into the world beyond my computer were the rest stop near Gaviota.

It had the best signage I had seen in a long while.

And this view of the mountains.

Frolicking dogs need to be careful of rattler snakes... just saying.

I also took a hike to see Chila... but I will save that for another post.

Poetry Thursday

If I knew that today would be 
the last time I’d see you sleep, 
I would hug you tight and 
pray the Lord be the keeper of your soul. 
If I knew that this would be the last time 
you pass through this door, 
I’d embrace you, kiss you, and 
call you back for one more. 
If I knew that this would be the last time 
I would hear your voice, 
I’d record each word 
to be able to hear it over and over again. 
If I knew this is the last time I see you, 
I’d tell you I love you, and would not 
just assume foolishly you know it already. 
-Johny Welch
From La marioneta de trapo

versión original:
Si supiera que hoy es última vez que te voy a ver dormir, te abrazaría fuertemente y rezaría al Señor para poder ser el guardián de tu alma. Si supiera que esta fuera la última vez que te vea salir por la puerta, te daría un abrazo, un beso y te llamaría de nuevo para darte más. Si supiera que ésta fuera la última vez que voy a oír tu voz, grabaría cada una de tus palabras para poder oírlas una y otra vez indefinidamente. Si supiera que estos son los últimos momentos que te veo, diría TE QUIERO y no asumiría tontamente que ya lo sabes.

St Patrick's Day...

On St. Patrick's Day, I remember my grandmother, pictured above with my older brother, because it was her birthday.

When I knew her, she would spend her birthday with us and then leave for Mexico to visit her sisters and brother.  She would stay there for six months and be back for the holidays. 

Not quite a snow bird, but something in that vein.

She died when I was only 5, so my memories of her are cloaked in the fog of a small child's mind.

She stayed with me a fair amount when she was in the US.  It is said we could not talk to each other as she didn't speak English and I didn't speak Spanish.  Actually, she chose not to speak English and I was still in the language acquisition phase, so there is no way to know what was going on in my brain.

But, when I started to speak Spanish, all those language acquisition memories were triggered.  Now, I believe that we probably communicated just fine.  She spoke, I understood and answered in whatever language seemed appropriate. 

Besides that early imprint of language skills, I inherited from her the finger.  It comes out unbidden whenever I need to slow someone's roll.  Not the middle finger, that would be vulgar.  The pointer finger that windshield wipes slowly or quickly depending on the need.

There may be other traits I inherited, I am just not aware.

What I know for sure is that the bond we had was real and ours alone.  After she was gone in the physical form, she would sometimes visit me.  I would wake in the middle of the night and see her seated at the foot of my bed, just watching.  Though we had a short amount of time, I carry our relationship with me wherever I go.

Happy birthday, grandma... hope you are celebrating with family in heaven.

Grandma

 Today my grandmother would have been 112.  I have been thinking about her a lot lately, as I contemplate how to tell her story -- whether I should or not -- what I know and don't know -- what is her story...

There are lots of questions and very few answers.

Questions like ... who did she cut out of this picture? It is just like my grandmother to have this picture with someone cut out.  She was the kind of person who could cut people out of her life.  It surprises me to admit this while at the same time I know it to be true.  I remember her as harsh, judgemental, not wishy washy at all.

But in this picture, sometime in the 1920s, I think, sometime before she married my grandfather or had my father, she is young and her face tells very little.  Inscrutable, that is another way to understand her stoicism which I often read as harsh.  Maybe she was feeling super vulnerable all the time.

I just can't always reckon how someone who had lost two parents by the time she was 9, or two siblings by the time she was 30 could have then turned around and cut out her only living sister.

But, of course, I don't know her story, not really.

I know bits and pieces.

Snapshots, like these photos that reveal so little and so much at the same time.

 What to make of the starch and the serious face ... everyone else here seems to be having a good time.  [click on pic to see the whole thing... maybe it is only the men who are yucking it up.] Did she not smile because the person behind the camera tried to get her to smile?  Who was behind the camera??

In another from the same day, she has that half smile that I remember from real life.  It was bemused and amused and slightly annoyed and maybe holding something back all at the same time.

But she looked smart in that hat.  Maybe that is why she needed to give the serious pose.

What about this one with my aunts.  She is almost smiling here -- at least her eyes are smiling.  Was my grandfather behind the camera this time? Was she about to break out in the big smile or was this as big as it got, emotions slipping out of the eyes even though the mouth holds the smile back.

And the hand gently holding her oldest daughter's hand ... not her youngest daughter's hand.

Maybe that says more about my aunts than it does about my grandmother, but is says something.

Happy birthday, Grandma. 

Hope you don't mind me teasing out some meaning from these photos and your life.

Seen on my walk

Dad in a wheelchair.

My eyes are drawn to his slippers. I see the son, well past middle age, pushing the wheelchair.

Upon exiting the coffee shop, the son opens sunglasses, the father turns his face expectantly as the son slides them on a look of love and appreciation passes between them.

Son pats father's head ostensibly to ensure cap is secure.

More love.

photolog - Las Vegas

We decamped for Las Vegas for the holidays -- it was my idea, but that was before I realized how hard it would be to travel with someone who had just had surgery.  But holidays are for being with the family, right?

Besides, who wouldn't want to make this happen?

There were some walks.

There were dogs.

And there was family.