HEY

I am not dead.

I am not writing.

I am just over here living life and feeling overwhelmed.

I might hate everyone and everything less if I unloaded over here more often. But that doesn't seem like a friendly way to use this space.

So, just dropping in to say that I have drafts in the folder, and they will be out next week.

I PROMISE.

Happy New YEAR, almost.

Poetry Thursday, grief, again...

Poof
 ~Amy Gerstler

Here on my lap, in a small plastic bag,
my share of your ashes. Let me not squander
them. Your family blindsided me with this gift.
We want to honor your bond they said at the end
of your service, which took place, as you’d
arranged, in a restaurant at the harbor,
an old two-story boathouse made of dark
wood. Some of us sat on the balcony, on black
leather bar stools, staring at rows of docked boats.
Both your husbands showed up and got along.
And of course your impossibly handsome son.
After lunch, a slideshow and testimonials,
your family left to toss their share of you
onto the ocean, along with some flowers.

You were the girlfriend I practiced kissing
with in sixth grade during zero-sleep
sleepovers. You were the pretty one.
In middle school I lived on diet Coke and
your sexual reconnaissance reports. In this
telling of our story your father never hits
you or calls you a whore. Always gentle
with me, he taught me to ride a bike after
everyone said I was too klutzy to learn.
In this version we’re not afraid of our bodies.
In this fiction, birth control is easy to obtain,
and never fails. You still dive under a stall
divider in a restroom at the beach to free me
after I get too drunk to unlock the door. You still
reveal the esoteric mysteries of tampons. You
still learn Farsi and French from boyfriends
as your life ignites. In high school I still guide you
safely out of the stadium when you start yelling
that the football looks amazing as it shatters
into a million shimmering pieces, as you
loudly admit that you just dropped acid.

We lived to be sixty. Then poof, you vanished.
I can’t snort you, or dump you out over my head,
coating myself in your dust like some hapless cartoon
character who’s just blown herself up, yet remains
unscathed, as is the way in cartoons. In this version,
I remain in place for a while. Did you have a good
journey? I’m still lagging behind, barking up all
the wrong trees, whipping out my scimitar far
in advance of what the occasion demands. As I
drive home from your memorial, you fizz in
my head like a distant radio station. What
can I do to bridge this chasm between us?
In this fiction, I roll down the window, drive
uncharacteristically fast. I tear your baggie
open with my teeth and release you at 85
miles an hour, music cranked up full blast.

What is so hard about grief is precisely this: (note from the author when her poem was posted on the Poem of the Day (emphasis mine):

 “An elegy that blends predominantly real and a few fictionalized details, this poem was written in honor of a friend who I met way back in fifth grade, who died last year. The loss of this bright, adventurous, beautiful woman who’d been my friend since before either of us wore a bra, since I had braces and hair down to my hips and she was a tall leggy pre-hippie with a cool nickname, who’d coached me through so many ‘firsts,’ (first drunkenness, first crushes, first sex, first drugs, etc., etc.) who had been such a beacon, is hard to process. Poems being one of the ways we can attempt to speak to and of the dead, this poem is for C., who was always 10 steps ahead of me.”

How do you speak of the dead and how do you keep your loved one alive?

Everyone going through grief will tell you, in lucid moments, that talking about your loved one is bittersweet; it is like that bruise you touch to ignite the memories. Of course, it is painful to recall your loved one is no longer here. But whether we like it or not, especially in the first few years of loss (yes YEARS), the knowledge that your loved one is gone is with you like the air around you. Those loved ones linger in every word, every memory, every breath. And, the thought that others will forget what is foremost in your mind, is even more painful. 

It is so very interesting how the memories have come to me over the last six years. As we approach the sixth anniversary of my sister's death, I am remembering the months before her death. We were all desperately trying to survive the death of my brother, gulping for life like someone drowning gulps for breath.

And then she was gone. No, then she was in the hospital and we were having to let her go.

I thought I had borne the greatest pain when I watched my brother's body dropped into a grave. It changed my relationship with cemeteries. It made me hate the place that took him to forever.

But this was so much more painful. So painful in fact that I tried to turn off life all together.

We were on the third day of being in the hospital when a friend noticed I hadn't eaten.

I remember that, but most of the rest of those days I do not remember. I only remember pain and hollow and a horrible headache. My head recalls the pain, as I write this, it explodes in the same pain.

In the past few months, I have been able to approach the memories of those days. Not full on remembering, but tentative glances through the portholes. I am still not sure what is real and what is distorted.

But there are other memories, too, that pop into my mind. Memories that are now only mine - of time with my sister and my brother - stories that only we three knew, that only we three remembered.

I wonder how I will learn to say good bye to them, or if I have to... and it hurts.

Poetry Thursday ... it's still Thursday...

Friendship 
is always 
a sweet responsibility, 
never an opportunity. 
― Kahlil Gibran

It might be a repeat ... but hopefully it is worth it.

Poetry Thursday

Scaffolding
~Seamus Heaney, 1939 - 2013

Masons, when they start upon a building,
Are careful to test out the scaffolding;

Make sure that planks won’t slip at busy points,
Secure all ladders, tighten bolted joints.

And yet all this comes down when the job’s done
Showing off walls of sure and solid stone.

So if, my dear, there sometimes seem to be
Old bridges breaking between you and me

Never fear. We may let the scaffolds fall
Confident that we have built our wall.


For a while, I collected Nobel Laureates in literature ... ok, not collected the actual people or even their books, but their public appearances. It is something for which I will be forever indebted to Princeton. Mr. Heaney is one of them. Magical. And this poem is gorgeous.

Bruised

There is a deep well of pain, but it is like an old bruise. I only feel it when something pushes up against it. Really hard.

In the span of two days, I heard from three people who I care for deeply about the loss of a loved one. In each case, I knew the person who died, but not awfully well. I knew each well enough to mourn their loss to the universe, but not well enough to speak to their lives.

But the losses buffeted me anyway. Gently, at first, slow tears welled in my eyes and my heart was full of compassion for my friend who lost her mother, her father, her boyfriend.

Next the circumstances threatened to blow me over.

One is a mother whose funeral the daughter will not be able to attend lest she lose her ability to stay in this country. Damned GOP and their ridiculousness. The rage, the helplessness, the anguish I feel is only a small measure of what that daughter feels.

One is a daughter who has lost now both mother and father in the span of four months. She is in shock right now. She can believably say she is glad to not see either in pain. She is heartened that she and her sister did all that they could to bring their parents comfort in their last days. But the hard road of living in a world without those parents, whose strength and faith and love are measured by their daughters' lives, is just beginning. The first year is shock and rawness, but the blinding pain is waiting just around the corner. The second year will feel like the year of firsts - first Christmas without them, some milestone the grandparents did not get to see, and the need/yearning to have just one more talk about something with mom or dad. I know this road too well, so the pain feels fresh as if someone has just fiercely slapped me across the face.

One is a girlfriend (seems odd to call a grown woman that), a lover, a confidant who lost her love before they could really begin a life together. These circumstances are the ones that spring from my mouth first when I talk about these losses. In some way, they are the lesson: don't wait; live now; do what makes you happy; be with the person who brings you joy. It is remorseful grief, biting like the memory of tripping over something in public but not falling. It is deep and imperceptible to those around you, but it winds its way around your heart, threatening to squeeze the life out of it. This might be why one tries to grasp on to the lesson, cheerfully determined to not have to live this remorse again. But the deep loss of a loved one will not just rest in remorse, it will coil through her body, when she alone causing her body to writhe and her mind to seek oblivion.

I am unable to do more for these people than write them notes to say my heart aches with theirs.

But my grief is so close to the surface that my tears are for my losses and the anguish of grief as much as it is for theirs.

Valentine's Day 2018 style

For years, I have *celebrated* Valentine's Day only as part of my divorce anniversary.  Truthfully, in the last five years, I have done nothing, as the grief veil barely allowed me to do more than check on others to make sure they were managing. In the last few years, I have added myself to the list of people to check on...yes, it took over three years to figure out I should be on that list.

Grief has been so very engulfing ... but I am trying to break out of it, slowly but surely.

So, in an attempt to stitch more of my heart back together, I am celebrating Valentine's this year - through poetry.

I have never liked poetry -- my initiation into the practice of reading it was like being dunked in cold water. My aversion was thrust upon me by some really terrible teachers. To overcome that aversion, I started collecting quotes ... and poetry, and sharing it here.

It seems fitting, then, to offer that to anyone reading this as well.

Poets.org has a little tool to help you find the perfect love poem. And here is more inspiration from NPR. ENJOY!

Here is the one I am choosing:

How to Love
~January Gill O’Neil

After stepping into the world again,
there is that question of how to love,
how to bundle yourself against the frosted morning—
the crunch of icy grass underfoot, the scrape
of cold wipers along the windshield—
and convert time into distance.

What song to sing down an empty road
as you begin your morning commute?
And is there enough in you to see, really see,
the three wild turkeys crossing the street
with their featherless heads and stilt-like legs
in search of a morning meal? Nothing to do
but hunker down, wait for them to safely cross.

As they amble away, you wonder if they want
to be startled back into this world. Maybe you do, too,
waiting for all this to give way to love itself,
to look into the eyes of another and feel something—
the pleasure of a new lover in the unbroken night,
your wings folded around him, on the other side
of this ragged January, as if a long sleep has ended.

This is the runner up, no less worthy or true:

Love Comes Quietly
~Robert Creeley, 1926 - 2005

Love comes quietly,
finally, drops
about me, on me,
in the old ways.

What did I know
thinking myself
able to go
alone all the way.