griefglow

TEMPORARILY GONE: but I haven't forgotten you!

2011-04-18T12:00:00.000-04:00

You'll have noticed that I haven't been posting here regularly. I'm working hard on two new books, and having to use all available writing time on them. I'll be back here posting again at some point, though perhaps not until the fall. In the meantime, I wish you all a pleasant and productive summer.

My many older posts on this blog may not show here, on this main page, as its display is date-sensitive and "times out" eventually. All of the previous material is still here, however; just click on "older posts" below.

LEGACY AND IMMERSION: wise words from poet Marge Piercy

2011-02-18T17:12:00.000-05:00

I've been thinking of legacy lately for many different reasons, including the preparation for my upcoming Effortless Memoir class at the Vero Beach Museum of Art on February 26.

There are all sorts of complexities to leaving a personal legacy, and sometimes it seems that the deeper one delves into the issue of what to leave behind the more difficult leaving any meaningful legacy becomes.

But some things about legacy are simple. Including this basic but easy to overlook fact: we all leave the most powerful legacy by not worrying too much about legacy, but rather living intensely and intentionally right now.

Legacy isn't created by hedging one's bets and projecting into the future. It's created by finding something you really love or believe in, and immersing yourself there in the present.

Contemporary American poet and novelist Marge Piercy has a wonderful way of communicating truths that are at once deeply complex and gorgeously simple. Though it is not about legacies only, her poem To Be of Us is all about the immersion that creates lasting ones. "The people I love the best/ jump into work head first/ without dallying in the shadows," she writes therein, adding, "I want to be with people who submerge/ in the task..." The poem concludes:

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.

But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.
(To Be of Use copyright Marge Piercy)
I love that phrase, "the pitcher cries for water to carry." As it suggests, we are all in some sense vessels, crying out for meaning to carry and memory or wisdom to share.

Visit Marge Piercy's website to learn more about the writer and her rich, varied and enduring work by
clicking here.

LIFE STORY WRITING 6: find the pivot

2011-02-08T09:00:00.006-05:00

You find out that you're going to have your first child, and your life pivots, turning in a whole new direction.

You lose a parent or mate, and your life pivots too.

You have a car accident. Win the lottery. Transfer to Seattle. Get diagnosed with diabetes. Decide to get divorced. Decide to get married. Fall in love with watercolor painting. Lose your house in a hurricane.

Each of these moments is what I call a "pivot," a time when your life takes a different and perhaps surprising turn.

If you want to try writing life stories but aren't sure where to start, find a pivot and write about that.

It doesn't matter which one. Any will do. With your pivot in mind you can write about a myriad of things. What you hoped. What you feared. How it happened. What you thought. Where you went. Who went with you. What you learned.

Everyone has pivots in their life. They will enjoy, and be educated by, reading about yours.

IN MEMORIAM, AGAIN: "recollecting" Henry

2011-02-07T13:57:00.000-05:00

I wrote a post last month about losing Henry, my dear "foster terrier," on January 19th. At the time I was too unfocused to remember that I wanted to give a public thanks to Dr. Lisa Jutras and the St. Francis Animal Hospital on Route 60 in Vero Beach. Dr. Lisa and the team there could not have been more skilled or more tender in their handling of both Henry and his teary-eyed owner, and I am deeply grateful for their caring, capability and compassion. Do consider them out if you are needing a good vet.

In the aftermath of Henry's death I have been thinking about the deep and soulful connection we humans can have with the animal world. It's tempting to believe that those bonds, and thus the loss we feel when an animal companion dies, are less important than those with our fellow humans, but I'm not sure that's entirely true. I think that the very wordlessness of our relationships with beloved pets makes those connections special: without all the emotional and intellectual overcomplication human dialogue is so apt to create, we can meet "our" animals in a place that is deeply soulful. We meet them, too, in a place of service...a sweet exchange in which each ministers to the other in a pure and lovely way.

I hope it goes without saying that I don't mean to dismiss either the depth or the breadth of human relationships. Rather, I just want to acknowledge the different yet still profound bond we can form with the other species we come to love.

By way of lightening this rather sad subject, I've included a photo that I hope will make you smile: a glimpse of me during the period in which I had a stress fracture in my right foot, sorting the mail in bed with a guardian terrier at my side. In case you can't tell which is which, I'm the one without the good pedicure.

LIFE STORY WRITING 5: undoing the lessons of the past

2011-02-07T09:00:00.005-05:00

Some more thoughts on writing life story as a part of building your personal legacy...this time, musings on the things we have to undo, rather than those we must do.

Most of us are taught writing in school—with mixed results. Hopefully, we end up with a working knowledge of English and its forms at the end of our schooling. But many of us also leave our years of English classes with less helpful lessons as well.

We learn to expect others to judge the small points of our writing, sometimes quite harshly. We learn to prize organization and logic over feeling and grammatical correctness over expression. We learn to write more easily in response to external pressure than in reaction to our own needs and preferences. We learn to admire "great" writers, but also to discount our own voices.

It's not surprising that as adults, we may find it more comfortable to avoid writing entirely than to take the risk of "failing." If we want to do any creative or legacy writing as adults, we must actually unlearn those lessons. This can be a slow process, and almost always requires some patience.

It may help to think consciously about your readers as you begin to write. Replace the mental image of that high-school teacher who picked on your grammar with a vision of your children, grandchildren, friends, colleagues: whoever it is you feel you are writing for. Seeing those loving faces in your mind's eye will help remind you that these days, there are no grades and no demerits.

To pass this "test," all you need to do is sit down and share a little of your heart.

LIFE STORY WRITING 4: the littlest life stories of all

2011-02-05T09:00:00.002-05:00

My brother recently sent me a book created by the editors of the online magazine SMITH, a home for all sorts of lively story-related projects. Called Not Quite What I Was Planning, the book is a collection of six-word memoirs. Yes, that's right, six words, as in the book title itself. This might be a bit too succinct for most of us writing life story, but it's interesting to see what folks come up with in this very limited form.

Some of the results are suprisingly poignant: "Learned to live with great loss"..."WASP wants to be soul man"..."I fell far from the tree"...Painful nerd kid, happy nerd adult"..."Wasted time regretted so life reinvented"..."Almost a victim of my family"..."Started small, grew, peaked, shrunk, vanished" and "Act Two curtain brought dramatic improvements." In some ways these little "bites" tell us little; in other senses they suggest so much. For example, the editors point out that the moving mini-memoir "Cursed with cancer, blessed with friends" was written not by a mature survivor but a nine year old. I'm sure many of the others have similar surprises behind them.

There is social commentary here and there, as in Dean Haspiel's "Tombstone won't say 'had health insurance'" and Johan Baumeister's "Joined Army. Came out. Got booted." There's disagreement: one six-word memoir says "I'm my mother and I'm fine," while another begs "Became my mother. Please shoot me." There's some poetry: "The light that night was perfect." And, of course, there's lots of playfulness and humor.

In that latter vein I particularly liked "Speaks mind especially when losing it," "Awkward girl takes chances. Fun ensues," "Occasionally wrong but never in doubt," "Never really finished anything, except cake," "Sold belongings. Became Itinerant Poetry Librarian," "A crush on Susan Sarandon. Unrequited" and "The psychic said I'd be richer" (Elizabeth Bernstein). Because a college professor once said that I had an "unfortunate passion for semicolons," I of course felt like a soul sister of Iris Page, who wrote "Semicolons; I use them to excess," yet as a teacher now myself I laughed at the rueful "All of my students hate me."

Though many of the writers are people not in the public eye, some are well known. It's interesting to see how they explain lives that are well documented elsewhere. "Me see world! Me write stories!" is Elizabeth Gilbert's apt offering, while another writer, Po Bronson, wrote slyly, "Stole wife. Lost friends. Now happy." Journalist and disabilities activist John Hockenberry wrote "IBM brat broke back; twins, Mac," a surprisingly detailed literal account of a complex life," while comic Stephen Colbert noted only, "Well, I thought it was funny."

Could you write your life story in six words? What would they be?

SMITH has lots of similar story starters. If you need some fun prompts, visit the site and check them out.

LIFE STORY WRITING 3: five simple story starters

2011-02-03T09:00:00.000-05:00

Following up on my last post, here are some easy but effective starting points for life story writing. You might want to try a few of these, and then continue on with whichever one or ones feels the easiest and most rich.

With all of these starters, the keys are the same. First, start small. Define your task as completing one paragraph, two paragraphs, or a single page at most, but try to write regularly. Second, don't judge or censor. Your writing doesn't have to be elegant, skilled, or even neat. As I said in my last post, whatever you write will be a treasure to those who come. Finally, be sure to store whatever you have written safely. If you created your text on a computer, back up the files and print a copy out as well.

1. Choose a single photograph from any point in your past and write a really detailed caption for it. Let yourself capture the people, place, and time it depicts in a full paragraph or even two. Place your text in the album or box in which you keep the photo. Tomorrow, consider writing a caption for another picture. As you go on to write about other images, you can stick to a particular time period or theme, or jump around in whatever way feels right.

2. Choose a single recipe you like to cook. (Or, if you're not a cook, a single recipe you like to eat!) Write a paragraph or two about it. Consider describing what you like about it, when and/or from whom you first learned it, when it is or was eaten, what other memories it inspires, what period of your life it reminds you of. Don't worry if your writing strays from the subject of food; the recipe is just a starting point.

3. If you want to write down memories for your children (adult or still young), start small. Choose one child; write down a single great memory of time with him or her. If you enjoy this, add a second memory about that child tomorrow, or move on to a memory about a different child (or sibling, or grandchild). Don't strain to choose an "important" memory; anything that is meaningful to you will be meaningful to that child, however simple or apparently trivial it seems. On the occasion of my fiftieth birthday, my dad wrote a a note to me with the memory of taking naps with me on his chest when I was an infant. I treasure that note all the more because it reminds me of such a small and tender moment.

4. Use place as a starting point for some memory writing. Each day, choose a single place and do some writing about it. The place you choose could be a home, a city, or a vacation spot. It could be as small as a single spot in your yard or house, or as big as your home town. Let your writing roam as it will, whether what comes up are memories of people, pastimes, landscapes...whatever comes up is just fine.

5. Do some writing about the people from your past. For example, you might make a list of five people who influenced you powerfully, then write about one of them each day. At the end of the five day period, decide where to go next. Do you want to write additional material about one or more of those people? Write about five new folks? Move on to a different starting point?

LIFE STORY WRITING 2: bigger is not necessarily better

2011-02-01T09:00:00.000-05:00

In my last post, I spoke about the trust—in ourselves and others—that we need to write and preserve our life stories. Today, just a brief practical note on that same topic.

Self-doubt is especially likely when we make a life story writing project too big or too complex. When we bite off more than we can chew, so to speak, we can end up getting mired in the details, losing momentum over time, or feeling unable to meet our own expectations. That's why I link this suggestion to the issue of trust. When we don't trust our potential readers to "get" us or our story, we may feel we need to over-research, over-explain, or over-complicate. We may not even be conscious that we're feeling uncertain or distrustful. Assuming that our kids, grandkids or other readers need lots and lots of information just feels natural...and so does assuming that our life stories won't be meaningful unless they are long or detailed.

I don't mean to prevent you from going into detail or writing at length if those modes feel right for you. Some life story writers genuinely enjoy sinking their teeth into ambitious projects. My point is just that you don't have to produce long or detailed writing to offer a meaningful written legacy.

To prove this point, picture an older relative that has passed on—a grandmother, perhaps. Now imagine that you have just discovered a diary you never knew existed—a journal in which that relative noted down her thoughts. Would you be less grateful for, and fascinated by, that diary if its entries were brief? Would you find it any less valuable if its "author" did not write at length or provide lots of background information? I'm confident that the answers to both questions would be "no." It might inspire you to find out more or even do some research. It might even make you wish its owner had written more. But the diary would be a treasure whether it was short or long, expansive or succinct. And what you would remember about it over the years wouldn't be its length or detail or historical accuracy, but rather the glimpse it gave you of your relative's heart.

Have I convinced you? I hope so. Check out my next post for some "life story starters" that can help you record memory or family material effectively and easily.

LIFE STORY WRITING 1: begin with trust

2011-01-31T09:00:00.000-05:00

I recently wrapped up a class called "Life Story Starters" for the LifeLong Learning Institute at the Indian River State College. (I'm giving a one-day variant on this same class, this time called Effortless Memoir, at the Vero Beach Museum of Art in late February; it's alphabetized under W for Workshops here). This series of posts is inspired by those classes, the peer students it's my privilege to serve within them, and the idea of leaving one's life stories as part of a personal legacy.

All of the lively and intelligent participants in the class wanted to write memory material. As always in such classes, many admitted to doubts about the value of their memories or the quality of their writing. I have complete empathy for anyone with these concerns. After many years as a professional writer, I still often doubt that what I am writing will be of interest to readers, even those in my own family. Especially in the middle of the process, the text I'm creating always feels like a formless mess with no redeeming value.

Yet I also know that when we let such doubts silence us, we withhold a genuine gift from the world. Every life story has value, whether one person reads it or one million. Every personal history witnesses the human condition, and the life of joy and struggle that all of us share in a myriad of different ways.

A funny thing happens in my life story classes after the participants share their self-doubt. The same folks who question their own pieces are rapt in listening to others. Always, without exception, the assignments we read aloud get nods of recognition. Always, the only pieces anyone doubts are their own.

Let’s remember that all of us doubt the value of our thoughts and the skill of our writing. Let’s laugh at our fears and write our reflections down anyway. Let's trust ourselves, and others, enough to share our life legacies generously.

There are enough times in our lives when we need to keep silent, even situations when we need not to speak our truth. This, happily, is not one of them.

IN MEMORIAM: losing Henry

2011-01-29T20:46:00.000-05:00

Last June, I welcomed an elderly fox terrier into my home to help out his owner, a lovely person who is struggling with serious illness. Henry quickly made himself at home in my house and my heart, as will not surprise those of you who met the goofy little guy. After two decades without a pet I had forgotten how lovely it can be to have a dog around. Henry was a lovely presence when I was at home, a lively companion on car trips to the post office and Humane Society Thrift Shop, and a sweet fellow to sleep with, despite his tendency to hog ninety percent of my bed and snore.

Henry was sixteen when I first met him; though he was extremely spry for his age I knew from the start that his "time" might not be far away. It came last Wednesday, when he went into heart failure and was put peacefully to sleep. My house and car seem painfully quiet without him, and the mere sight of his dog bed or water bowl can make me terribly sad. But even at my weepiest moments my strongest feeling is appreciation. My years of caregiving had tired me at the deepest level—left me wanting to be still and solitary and responsible for, and to, no one. Henry helped open my heart again. There wasn't a single day when the sight of him didn't make me smile, or when some odd little habit of his didn't make me laugh. He quite simply brought me joy, and that's one of the best compliments I can pay any thing or any being.

It's been said that the closest bonds are not always the longest; my time with Henry proved the truth of that adage. Maybe our time with dogs can't be counted in conventional human days, any more than their lifespans can. Maybe relationship of any kind must be judged by tenderness as well as length. No matter how you measure it, Henry and I had six great months. To misquote Hamlet: Farewell, sweet silly pup. May quires of angels sing thee to thy rest, and may heaven never run out of liverwurst.

EBB AND FLOW: apologies and a new year's greeting

2011-01-02T18:39:00.000-05:00

When I opened up this blog today I was shocked to see that I had not posted here since October. How could more than two months have passed? Where have I been?

I'm not exactly sure.

I think that's why it was so hard to blog. Everything seemed unclear there for a while. I found myself revisiting all sorts of actions and feelings from the past, looking at them in a new way. I felt the grief for my late parents again, or perhaps I should say I felt a new sense of loss for and celebration of them for the first time. I revisited the way my home was arranged, and moved most of the things in it until it felt more authentic to the way I feel and live now. I sold some things I had owned for decades, and donated many more. I revisited the issue of my writing, which again got pushed rather onto the back burner during the year, and the related issue of my teaching and consulting business.

Several times during the process I had flashes of memory from my childhood days on the beach. The motion of the waves fascinated me. And the complex, moody play of colors. The endless changes and movements. The way the water moved the things in its path. Some of the round, heavy pebbles of that northern beach seemed barely jostled by each new wave, but as I stood there, rooted and watching, they did move, sometimes quite far.

That's probably why I remembered those beachside experiences during this time. They seemed a newly apt metaphor for the place where I find myself. Little in my life seems to have changed, and at times I feel that I have made little progress. And yet even the heaviest of the stones move if I wait long enough, and muster enough patience for the slow, eddying work of time.

From my place in the ebbing and flowing of life, I send a New Year's Greeting to all of you out there, and wish that you will have a deep and fluid twenty-eleven. You will find me posting here again, now that I know once more where I am. I am here on the beach, honing my capacity to muster the grace and patience to let the rocks move.

MYSTERIOUS ALBUMS, unknown lives

2010-10-09T09:00:00.000-04:00

My recent posts on my own family photos reminded me of a vintage photo album I bought in a thrift shop a decade or so back. I loved the "period" look of it--the black pages annotated with white ink, the traditional photo corners, the textured cover. I was amazed to see that virtually all of its several hundred photos were intact. And yes, being the sentimental crazy woman I am, I was saddened by it. Here was the history of an entire personal and family life, lovingly created, a small treasure but one that is both complex and precious...left to languish on a shelf with a ten dollar price tag. Naturally, I could do nothing other but scoop it up for "adoption."

My photo-expert pal CJ scanned the images and also some of the actual pages for a project we did several years ago; I've added one of those scans to this post. As it shows, this photo-owner did caption her photos, and in a graceful handwriting few of us today can match. I've sometimes said that I'm going to do a web search and see if I can find the descendents of some of the names in the book. So far, though, I haven't done much more than browse the album, use some of the pictures in art and blog posts, and simply enjoy it all.

And that enjoyment is the paradox of my ownership of this piece of ephemera. The family pictured in the album might not have valued it, or perhaps they just didn't know it was there for the asking. But I, a complete stranger, love it. I remember its dogs, its houses, its trips to beaches and lakeside cabins. To me it is precious in part because of its mystery. It isn't my family; it's the human family. Maybe that's why I never quite get around to searching for the families it pictures. Maybe it reverberates all the more because of what it doesn't say.

CJ SAYS: "envision seven generations"

2010-10-08T07:47:00.001-04:00

When I turned on my computer I found book designer, systems genius and just-plain-interesting-thinker CJ Madigan's new blog post, "Envisioning Seven Generations," in my email inbox. If you're interested in legacy or personal stories, it's one to read (just click on its title and the link will get you to it).

CJ reminds us that once we're gone, the information and stories we take for granted in our own lives will be as unknowable to those seven generations in the future as peoples' lives seven generations ago are to us today. We assume that no one really cares, but that's just not the case. Her words spoke to me powerfully because as I organize my parents' photo collection, I'm beset with exactly the kind of bafflement she describes. Where was this picture of my great-grandparents taken? What is the name of the best man at Mom and Dad's wedding? Is this Victorian baby photo my grandmother or someone else--and if it's a grandmother, which one? When exactly did dad's family come to this country?

I don't know the answers to any of those questions, or to countless others like them, and I dearly wish I did. I feel a kind of grief when I realize that I didn't take advantage of the countless years I had to ask some of these questions;

One of the things CJ's post inspired me to do is deceptively simple: to caption the back of my own photos with things like the names of the people pictured, the place the picture was taken, and the approximate date. I've promised myself not to get perfectionistic, just to get down what I know. It's tempting to think that no one will care that one photo is of my college dorm room junior year and the next is of my off-campus apartment senior year, that this guy is my first boss and this other guy is the man I loved in my thirties. But as CJ reminded me, I can't know that for sure...and better safe than sorry.

In the spirit of this post, I'll close by telling you that the photo at its beginning is of my twin brother Andy on the lawn of our family house in Caldwell, New Jersey in 1960 or thereabouts. The front yard had thirteen majestic old trees that offered both delight (jumping in giant leaf piles) and torture (helping Mom and Dad rake) every autumn. Our property had a wall that raised it above the street by eight feet or so in the front; the white shape you can see on the ground under the leaves is a big old canvas dropcloth. In the days before day finally got a leaf blower, we raked the leaves onto it, dumped it over the wall, and raked the leaves into the gutter for pickup from there. Andy and I had small, child-friendly rakes, so maybe Dad posed him with a full-scale one for this shot. Either way, I've always loved this particular photo of Andy, with its combination of solidity and skepticism. "You've got to be kidding me," his expression seems to say; "this job's going on forever."

PHOTOS, in and out of sorts

2010-10-06T12:37:00.000-04:00

At long last and after much creating, shuffling, stacking, and moving of photo piles, I finished getting my family photos into some kind of order this past weekend.

It's satisfying to see the results: a nice-sized box of original photos waiting to be given to my sister and brother, a rough pick of shots to use in the photo books CJ Madigan is making for me through her newly-under-development Snapshot Stories book creation product, and three neat boxes of photos to keep here. One of the benefits (aside from the general pleasure of neatness) is that I can actually enjoy the pictures now, rather than having to rummage around searching when I wanted to use or look at one.

I don't usually mention products, but I must say that the Creative Memories PowerSort photo boxes I used for this project were a nearly perfect solution both for the sorting process and now for my storage needs. I have no relationship with Creative Memories, so I don't mention this with any agenda; I just love it when folks come up with truly useful and ingenious solutions for problems, and appreciate a product that does exactly what it says it does and more. The large versions each hold a whopping 1,200 photos in durable, waterproof, portable and photo-safe fashion (photo safety is important to everyone, but portability and waterproofing are especially crucial to those of us who live in hurricane zones). The twelve mini-containers that can go into and out of each box helped me break down the collection by groups (photos of mom, photos of dad, photos of them together, etc., etc.) and made the sorting much easier than it would have been without them. They're not cheap, but they're immensely more useful than the ordinary little photoboxes I tried to use before.

Having finally gotten everything collected in one place, I was shocked to see that I had over three thousand actual hard-copy photos even after I'd made big boxes for my siblings. That number seemed ludicrously large until I thought about it. I took several hundred shots on every one of my major vacations; each family Christmas probably contributed another fifty or more, each new neice and newphew were good for several hundred over the years...the list goes on and on. When I thought about it this way, I was actually surprised that I didn't have more photos.

Digital photography will reduce these numbers for generations to come; they'll be able to store images on disk rather than having each and every picture developed and printed. I'd like to think that will make their lives easier when it comes to family photos. But then I remember how much most of us struggle to keep our data backed up and deal with computer meltdowns, as well as how many more images most of us take now that we're digital...and I think that it'll be just as hard for them, just in a different way.

PHOTOGRAPHS, past and present

2010-09-08T16:37:00.001-04:00

To give myself some respite from the computer, I spent some of Labor Day weekend sorting through photographs of my late mom and dad. My friend and colleague CJ Madigan is going to create small books from them using her new Snapshot Stories format (I'm a test subject; watch her web site for its introduction later this fall, and this blog for a peek at my books when completed.)

Looking through old photos is a mixed blessing once you've lost close loved ones. The sight of their faces in a picture is bittersweet, reminding you that they are no longer here yet at the same time recalling happy times together. My own photo "shoebox" had scores of wonderful shots, an abundance that made choosing among them difficult.

Today, most everyone has that same kind of overstuffed shoebox (or album, or drawer). The most obvious reason for this is that these days anyone can take a photo, from almost any kind of device from the most elaborate camera to the simplest cell phone. Anyone can print that photo, too, at least anyone who has access to a drugstore photo lab or a home computer. How different this is from my childhood, when developing a negative required both expertise and a special room full of expensive equipment, much less from the early days of photography when the camera, too, was expensive and difficult to use.

But it's not just technical issues that allow us to take photographs for granted today. We also enjoy long life expectancies and relatively easy, relatively affordable travel. It's fairly easy, most of the time at least, to see the people we have photographs of. The exact opposite was true in the early days of photography. Travel was dangerous and expensive; families that were separated might not see each other for years, if ever. Death was an everyday fact of life, taking away everyone from infants to children to mothers and on. The rich could afford portraits of those from whom either death or other circumstance had separated them, but others could not.

And so a photograph was not just a pleasure, but a prize. Here is Jane Welsh Carlyle, the wife of celebrated author and intellectual Thomas Carlyle, writing on the subject in 1860: "Blessed be the inventor of photography! I set him above even the inventor of chloroform! It has given more positive pleasure to poor suffering humanity than anything else that has cast up in my time or is like to—this art by which even the poor can possess themselves of tolerable likenesses of their absent dear ones."

That reference to chloroform is worth noting; it wasn't one that was made lightly. Ether and chloroform, the first general anesthetics, were still relatively new in 1860 (Queen Victoria, for example, had not used one until the birth of her eighth child in 1853). To set photography above chloroform, a substance that relieved horrendous labor or surgical pain, was to praise it highly indeed.

So while culling down my pile of "possible" photos was a chore, I tried not to forget that it was also a privilege. We are indeed lucky today, not just to have the luxury of easy photography (and easy book-making services like CJ's) but also to have the blessing of the long and healthy lives that let us enjoy each other in person.

ONE CLASSIC, TWO WAYS

2010-09-07T18:25:00.000-04:00

Mary Elizabeth Frye's poem Do not stand at my grave and weep is one of the world's best known poems on death and grief, having been translated and adapted to music across the world since its creation in 1932.

This isn't great poetry per se; it doesn't have the emotional or linguisitc depth of great writers on loss like John Donne or Dylan Thomas. Yet it's a powerful poem nonetheless, precisely because of that simplicity. It's timeless, and in some way place-less too, meaningful to anyone who has ever looked at nature. To me, in fact, it reads more like hymn lyrics than like a modern lyric poem. In addition to the printed version, I've given you a version of the poem sung by Welsh classical crossover artist Katherine Jenkins on her Living A Dream CD. I don't always like the result when poems are set to music; often, the language alone is more effective. But because this poem is so simple in its cadences and hymn-like in its diction, it seems to fit naturally with melody, and just as naturally with Jenkin's classical voice.

Do Not Stand at my Grave and Weep

Do not stand at my grave and weep.
I am not there, I do not sleep.
I am in a thousand winds that blow,
I am the softly falling snow.
I am the gentle showers of rain,
I am the fields of ripening grain.
I am in the morning hush,
I am in the graceful rush
Of beautiful birds in circling flight,
I am the starshine of the night.
I am in the flowers that bloom,
I am in a quiet room.
I am in the birds that sing,
I am in each lovely thing.
Do not stand at my grave and cry,
I am not there. I did not die.

JOANNA TROLLOPE ON LOVE AND LOSS

2010-08-15T18:19:00.001-04:00

British writer Joanna Trollope writes family, love and change with warmth, delicacy, and a wise understanding of the complexities of modern lives. Two of Trollope's novels, Next of Kin and A Passionate Man, deal explicitly with themes of loss and grief. A Passionate Man, my favorite of the two, begins when its protagonist Archie Logan learns that his father, who for many years has been a widower, has begun a passionate relationship with a charming older woman. Archie is an adult with a busy, successful life, but his father's sudden transformation from parent and best friend to besotted man in love jolts him back into childlike feelings of loss, jealousy and doubt. As he struggles to accept this new perspective on his father, he begins to question himself, his marriage and career as well—questions that remain far from resolved when his father suddenly passes on. The lives and personalities in the story are rich and messy, just as in real life, and the ending is happy without being in any way glib, simplistic or pat. I suppose that's the thing that I liked best about the book: Trollope's ability to write about the way change is inevitable in human lives, as well as the way we all grieve, heal, and move on.

OPTIMISM: poet Jane Hirshfield on true resilience

2010-08-03T13:26:00.007-04:00

I read this poem by the gifted American contemporary poet Jane Hirshfield for the first time just recently, and it really spoke to me. I especially love the qualifier, "Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam/ returns over and over to the same shape..." How aptly that describes the unthinking, unchanging optimism many of us have early in life...and how lyrically the remainder of the work evokes the deeper resilience that comes with time, experience, and pain.

Optimism
More and more I have come to admire resilience.
Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam
returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous
tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side,
it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,
mitochondria, figs–all this resinous, unretractable earth.

Most definitely, a poet worth reading.

"Optimism" is by Jane Hirshfield and appears in Given Sugar, Given Salt, © Harper Collins, 2002.This link to the archives of Poetry magazine gives you a brief biography of the poet and several of her other beautifully written poems; this one brings you to the agency that books her for speaking and readers, which offers a longer biography.

LOSSES AND SPRING LEAVES

2010-07-28T18:01:00.002-04:00

I love this photograph of a cemetery monument jostled by new foliage. It's beautiful, and it "says" something true in a slightly impish way.

The true part is that our losses from the past and the new growth of the future coexist, side by side. We may not see the growth part when we are suffering the early stages of bereavement, but it's there somewhere, waiting. Waiting to nudge us with its exuberance. Waiting to give the world around us color and freshness and purpose again. Waiting to prove to us that no matter how stony our soil feels, new life will grow there.

The impish part is that new life won't always arrive in dignified ways. Sometimes it pops up right in our face, just forcing us to take notice.

CAREGIVING'S DECLUTTERING, AND BACK

2010-07-26T17:56:00.001-04:00

Writer and ecologist Susan J. Tweit's Walking Nature Home blog is subtitled "living a green and generous life," and those two "g words" describe it perfectly. (She is also the author of a memoir of the same name, published by the University of Texas Press in 2009, among other books and texts.) Browsing the blog's rich writings, I came across an older post that spoke directly to my heart, and I think may speak to you as well if you have walked the journey of a caregiver. One of the subjects treated in the blog is the journey of Tweit's husband, Richard Cabe, through treatment for brain cancer. On January 24 of this year, she wrote:

Since Richard and I moved home from our sojourn in the land of brain cancer radiation treatment—has it only been a week and a half?—I've been struggling to regain a healthy working rhythm. While we were away, life was simpler in some ways. My main focus was caring for Richard and helping him stay as healthy as possible—physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. Beyond that, my energy went into taking care of me, which means doing yoga every day, taking walks, and writing the words of my heart and spirit. I had left the to-do list, the obligations, the everyday worries at home. It wasn't hard to stay grounded and steady.

In the transition back home though, I somehow lost that cancer-cloister serenity. My life is suddenly cluttered by worries and obligations and to-dos. I worry about money. (Back to the real world.) I'm overwhelmed by trying to balance work, house, husband, and community. My to-do list seems endless: writing assignments, consulting, workshops to plan, a keynote speech coming up, presentations, schedules, bills, the house, yard and garden, friends, family....

This morning though, as I purged and dusted and organized my work space, I felt myself settle. With the clutter cleared away, I could see anew the life and work I've built in the treasures I've surrounded myself with...[read the rest of the post here]

I, too, felt that paradox: that when I was most deeply engaged in the rich, demanding service of caring for and with a sick loved one, the convoluted triviality of everyday life seemed to recede almost entirely from my consciousness. On one level, cancer and chemo are so profoundly and painfully complex; in another sense, I realized during this time, they are completely stark and simple. In a cancer center or "sickroom," a hospice or hospital, our priorities are clear. And then we comes back to home ground, to the to-do list and complications and blur that Tweit writes about so gracefully. Like her, the only way I could get my focus back was to treat the house I returned to as somehow new, polishing and emptying it so that I could reconnect with it and myself. I even asked a dear friend if she'd help me create some kind of "returning home ritual"; she brought nurturing food and fragrant sage, and we smudged the house to help renew its spirit as well as my scattered, disoriented energy.

Let's not be surprised if we can't quite connect with what is familiar or ordinary when we return from the deep spaces of planning and coordinating and giving care. Those spaces are worlds of their own, and it makes sense that we'd need to do some literal and metaphorical housecleaning in order to feel at home once more.

FINAL WORDS: a Japanese tradition

2010-07-26T09:00:00.000-04:00

The Japanese, who have traditionally looked at death very differently than we do here in the West, have a very old poetic form called jisei: the death poem. Usually written right on the verge of dying, jisei are in some sense a farewell to life and consciousness: the spiritual counterparts of the making of a last will, an important tradition in Japanese culture. Samurai wrote jisei, as did lovers who committed double suicide and people in a variety of other fields. But many of the surviving jisei we have today were written by Japanese monks, and their names, ages, and dates of death are recorded along with their poems. In the process the poems become the monks' legacies, lasting long after their lives, always quietly lived, have ended and passed into history.

The practice of writing a poem right during the act of dying sounds morbid, doesn't it, and also pretty strange? I can't imagine anyone here in the West consciously trying to time their death simultaneously with a poem, though perhaps we should try it. One jisei story tells of a man so preoccupied with making sure that his death poem was appropriate that he began writing examples when he was fifty, a full thirty years or more before he actually died. Maybe the challenge inherent in the project gave him what we would call a longer lease on life.

There is something moving about many jisei pieces, which are mostly in the haiku or tanka form. Some are haunting: A journey of no return:/ the wanderer's sack is/bottomless, wrote a monk named Kyoshu just before his death in 1769. The surface/ of the water mirrors/ many things, another monk wrote in 1825; still another, Boarding the boat/ I slip off my shoes:/moon in the water. Even in the awkwardness of translation, which can never hope to capture either the rhythm of the originals or their complexity of their imagery, they are hauntingly lovely.

But some jisei are wry and earthy. My only hope against/ the cold/one hot-water bottle, wrote Meisetsu; monk Raishi writes, You've done your duty/ till today,/ old scarecrow. A brother named Shiyo, who died at only 32, was downright sardonic--forgiveable, perhaps, in such a young man: Surely there's a teahouse/ with a view of plum trees/ on Death Mountain, too. Utsu, who died in cherry-blossom season, used it for inspiration. The owner of the cherry blossoms/ turns to compost/ for the trees, he wrote.

Whether they are sad or sardonic, jisei always seem to accept—or even embrace—death as a natural part of life rather than just an abrupt or unfair ending to it. That's a hard place for most of us to reach, but jisei let us spend a small, resonant moment there.

The poems quoted above, and many more, can be found in Yoel Hoffmann's lovely collection Japanese Death Poems: Written by Zen Monks and Haiku Poets on the Verge of Death.

NO TRAIN TODAY

2010-07-23T21:00:00.000-04:00

I remembered having this photo in my digital archives as I re-read Louise Glück's poem before writing my post on it Wednesday.

The image isn't related to the poem in any literal way, but it's one I like. I found it early in the days of my grieving, and it expressed exactly how I felt: stopped in my tracks, almost literally. The familiar grooves along which my life had run seemed to have disappeared, or at least become impassable; as for the engine, the energy that had always fueled me, it had just stopped cold. I'll stop beating the metaphor over the head now; you get the idea.

I'm glad to say that though it took a lot longer than I could have imagined, my life (and my capacity to live it with zest) are chugging along once more. Patience, as always, was the key...though as I have said before, it's not my best quality (or even my second best). It's hard to trust that curiosity, passion, and energy will come back when you can't see a glimpse of them no matter how hard you stare at the horizon. Yet eventually they do return—and suddenly you have a train expected, arriving, today, this very minute, now.

RUMBLINGS OF DEPARTURE

2010-07-21T09:00:00.001-04:00

I loved this small poem by the American poet Louise Glück. Called Departure. it shows us the briefest glimpse of a complex story without explaining what that story is. Yet the emotions, though evoked with indirection and subtlety, are clear. The combination of said and unsaid, present and absent, is often what gives poetry its resonance, and so it is here.

Departure
Louise Glück
My father is standing on a railway platform.
Tears pool in his eyes, as though the face
glimmering in the window were the face of someone
he was once. But the other has forgotten;
as my father watches, he turns away,
drawing the shade over his face,
goes back to his reading.

And already in its deep groove
the train is waiting with its breath of ashes.

The poem is reprinted from the poet's book The House on Marshland, originally published by the Ecco Press in 1975. (The always interesting Ecco is now an imprint of HarperCollins.) The book is now, sadly, out of print, though copies can likely be found at your library or bought on used-book sites like http://www.alibris.com/.

A PERFECT LITTLE FILM ON THE PASSAGE OF TIME

2010-07-19T14:54:00.000-04:00

Though it uses no fancy techniques and makes no startling statements, this little film on the passing of time is a quiet gem. If you have children or grandchildren, it will surely speak to you; but if you don't, it will probably speak to you anyway. It is from Gretchen Rubin, the author of the New York Times bestseller The Happiness Project.

FORGOTTEN TIMES, FORGOTTEN REMNANTS

2010-07-19T13:57:00.000-04:00

The news last week reported that archaeologists working at the Ground Zero site in New York have found a ship buried in the eighteenth century as part of the extension of the land in lower Manhattan. (Click here for the story as reported with the most historical background.)

It's not yet clear how much of the ship is intact or what its actual date and significance is, and though the details will probably be interesting I don't much care about them. What captured my imagination in the story is the layering of history of which the story reminds us. Cycles of birth and death, creation and destruction: that's always the way of things. A house witnesses births and deaths, celebrations and griefs. Land is excavated and built up, demolished and build up again. What once were roads become parks and what once were parks become roads. And a city landscape destroyed by one century's plane is found to be built on the remains of another century's ship, in a place another century's people were trying to make better use of.

There's nothing in this discovery that makes Ground Zero less stark or sad. (As a former worker there, I have to admit that I've never been able to visit the site since 9/11.) Yet it does remind us that change, of whatever kind, is part of the nature of things. We are all part of time's complicated layering, for all that we feel unique in both our accomplishments and our pain; and what we think is buried often rises again, in some other form, at some other time.

THE LOSING SEASON

2010-07-13T21:16:00.001-04:00

I've been very aware that I haven't posted on this blog at all since the anniversary of my mother's death in late June. I was busy with a cluster of deadlines at work, but the anniversary of my father's death on July 5 also silenced me for a bit. I was surprised by how deeply I felt it, having just written about being able to move past some of the painful memories of my mother's passing. I had forgotten that this season has a cumulative power for me, and that I usually feel far more subdued near the end of it than near the beginning.

When I was younger, this time of year seemed filled with happy events and rituals. (The picture of my dad at left is from a happy summer many decades past.) Now, from Mother's Day through the Fourth of July, not a couple of weeks goes by without some date or holiday that reminds me of my parents' lives, and also their absence. Dad's birthay is the week after Mother's Day; Father's Day and the anniversary of Mom's death are in June; Dad died on July 5. There are even two sports events during this time, Wimbledon and the U.S. Open golf tournament, that hold special memories of them.

These things no longer make me feel as sad as they did right after my parents' deaths. But the rhythm of these months with their small detonations of grief and memory still has a bittersweet feel, as does the Fourth in particular. I'm not sure I will ever forgot going home from the hospital late in the evening of Independence Day, 2005, and seeing the fireworks of a holiday I had forgotten explode in the dark sky over the road I drove along. Dad, who had broken his hip three days before, was unconscious by this time, blessedly sleeping and peaceful. As I watched the bursts of color high above the road it felt as though he were speaking to me, reminding me that it was time for him to be free of a body filled with injuries and illness. Selfishly, I did not want him to go. What daughter who can count her father not just as parent but as friend ever does? But he was ready, and I knew it. No fireworks have ever looked more beautiful to me, or spoken more painfully of independence.

A BITTERSWEET FORGETTING

2010-06-25T08:26:00.000-04:00

Yesterday was the fifth anniversary of my mother's death.

And the first year I forgot it. A bittersweet milestone.

Every other year since 2005, the date was impossible to forget. Memories of that morning in Hospice House came flooding back on their own.

But this year June 25 was just a busy day, full of deadlines that were also pleasures. I didn't really look at the calendar much, but even if I had, things like "book review due" and "conference call with Ben" were the things I associated with June 24.

Yesterday I thought of Mom several times, as I do almost every day. I missed her, as I also always do. I just didn't think of her death.

That's why this milestone is bittersweet. I'm chagrined at forgetting such an important date in my life and Mom's life. I fear that it means I'm unloving, uncaring. There's a touch of guilt in me, and shame.

But there's also a paradoxical and surprising joy here.

I don't like to put words in the mouths of those who have passed away. Those of us still living don't know for sure what they would feel if they were here, and I never like it when people pretend we do.

But I will hazard a guess. At her best, Mom was someone who tried to live very much in the present. She believed in joy, and healing. She didn't believe in rehashing the dark days of the past, or in endless guilt.

And so I am guessing that Mom would understand that in forgetting the anniversary of her death, I was not forgetting her, but rather remembering her life rather than her passing. I am guessing that she would understand that I finally have her tucked so firmly in my heart that I no longer think as much of losing her. And I am guessing that she would approve.

I could be wrong about that. I am not wrong in saying that she was a very special woman, who gave her daughter a lifetime of gifts both tangible and intangible.

In memorium Patricia Anne Fox. Born October 12 in a year she told only when forced to. Deceased June 24, 2005.

Rest in peace and joy, Patty Anne.

BIG PICTURE, SMALL LENS

2010-06-22T21:48:00.000-04:00

Photographer Jeannette Montgomery Barron's little book My Mother's Clothes: An Album of Memories recently reminded me that we sometimes create the most vivid memorials to those we've loved and lost when we give ourselves permission to to notice small things rather than stretch for big meaning.

(If you follow my Working Writer Wonders blog, you will remember a recent post about the same book, in a different context.)

In her prime, Barron's mother Ellie was what we once called a clothes horse, a woman who loved exquisite garments and owned a lot of them. Later in life, as her memory began to fail, her daughter began to photograph her clothes to help spark recollections. The images in the book--of dresses and stockings, purses and bathing caps, hangers and size labels--thus have a double resonance. The project may have begun as an aid to the mother's memory, but in the end it also became a way to sustain the daughter's.

There are only a very few pages of photographs of Eleanor herself, and they come right at the very end of the book. But the simplicity of the still life photos and the very brief text Barron wrote to accompany each such a rich, specific picture that I barely noticed their absence. I felt Ellie's presence. I felt the pain of the absences her Alzheimer's and then her death created. I felt that in some way I knew Barron herself as well, knew some of the ways her personality was shaped in response to her mother's.

Barron makes no grand claims for her mother or her book, describes few of the details in a traditional biography, and offers few if any grand words about "big" concepts like values, legacy, or the meaning of life and death. Maybe that exactly why her lovely little work speaks so clearly...because it pays such quiet and devoted attention to the small choices that, in the end, comprise a life.

My own mom's personal style was completely different from that of Barron's mom, yet the book sparked so many of my own memories. If you're a daughter like me, I bet it will do the same for you whether your mother is living or not. Her web site is worth a visit, too; click here to visit the page where she talks about the book and its inspiration.

FATHER'S DAY: the shadows of loss

2010-06-21T00:43:00.000-04:00

Today was Father's Day, which also means that it was the last day of the annual U.S. Open golf tournament. Watching the Open was a family tradition when my parents were alive; we all gathered for lunch or Sunday dinner, then watched the golf as the afternoon wore on. Dad loved the intricacy and unpredictability of the game, and I found enjoying it with him both fun and deeply relaxing. (Translated: I often dozed happily off.) Mom would come in and out, cheering on the family favorites and bringing snacks in her time-honored way. There was always good food to be had at their house—the same could not always be said at my single-woman's house across town—and her goodies became as much a part of our Father's Day tradition as the Open's deep roughs and punishing hole placements.

I watched a bit of the tournament this year. It was held at beautiful Pebble Beach and it was full of its usual twists and turns. But sports-watching isn't quite the same without Dad, just as antiquing has lost much of its charm for me now that Mom isn't there to share my outings. It's not that I never go antique shopping, or never enjoy some sporting event on TV, or never think I might enjoy them again. It's just that for me, it turns out that both things were pleasureable more as a way to spend time with the folks than as an activity in themselves.

I guess what I'm saying is really simple, in the end: when we lose the people we love most, we sometimes lose the pastimes we loved most, too. Could I get my joy those pastimes back? Probably. But without Mom and Dad, I just don't have the desire to. Easier and more rewarding to find new pursuits, ones that don't have the shadow of loss to dim their pleasure.

LITTLE, SIMPLE, WISE

2010-06-18T23:15:00.000-04:00

In the period after I lost my parents, I found and bought some excellent books on bereavement and healing.

The problem, as I discovered, was that I couldn't focus enough to read any of them. Some of them sit on my bookshelf today, still unread. By the time I could muster enough attention to read them, I no longer urgently needed the comfort they had to give.

Much later, I came across a little book that seemed designed to accomodate that kind of difficulty. How to Survive the Loss of a Love, written by Melba Cosgrove, Harold Bloomfield, and Peter McWilliams and first published in 1976, calls itself "first aid for emotional hurt (and a little second aid too)."

Co-written by a psychiatrist, a psychologist, and a poet, it describes itself as "kindly" and "companionable," and those words are just right. Rather than lengthy prose, it offers a series of small lists, focused paragraphs, and the occasional brief poem. I can guess what you're thinking: poems? Okay, let's be honest: these are not Shakespeare's sonnets. But even as something of a poetry snob, I think they make a real contribution to the book, creating yet another easy way for readers to recognize how universal their painful feelings are. Another useful feature of How to Survive the Loss of a Love is a series of brief suggestions about tangible things to do as healing progresses. I tend to approach "to do" lists with skepticism even in subjects less challenging than grief, but these were perfectly composed--wise, gentle, and reassuring whether you do them or not.

My copy came from a thrift store, and it looks as worn and well-loved as an old teddy bear. Many of its pages are turned down at the top, mostly those relating to forgiveness and rebound relationships. As I flipped through it for the first time, I wondered what had happened to its previous owner. But I didn't wonder why they read it more than once. I read it more than once too, and I've given copies to friends experiencing difficult times, too.

SILENCE AND RESPECT

2010-06-16T09:14:00.000-04:00

This photograph came up when I was searching istockphoto.com for images for my book Grief Country. The photographer didn't say where or when it was from, but the information wasn't really necessary. The image said it all.
For a long time after my dad's death, I kept a printout of this sign pinned to my bulletin board, to remind me of what I deserved from people there in the "real world" that felt so very distant. Silence when it came to advice, however well intentioned. And respect, for both my sadness and my underlying resilience. I didn't show the photo to anyone else. I just used it to help me stay clear. Feel free to use it in the same way if it might help you.

KAY JAMISON'S JOURNEY THROUGH GRIEF

2010-06-13T12:44:00.000-04:00

I first discovered doctor and author Kay Redfield Jamison when I read her first book, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness. The memoir, told from the unique perspective of someone who both suffers from bipolar disorder and acts as a doctor treating those who suffer from it as well, impressed me deeply. Fiercely honest and fiercely intelligent, beautifully written and above all courageous, it is the kind of experience a good memoir should be, the kind that deepens our understanding of what it is to be human.

I just finished Nothing Was the Same, her latest book, and it has many of those same strengths. The story begins with the death of her husband, Richard Wyatt, before flashing back to their lives, their meeting, their courtship, and their marriage. They met in mid-life, and built the kind of marriage that can only come, perhaps, from that age. It is quirky and yet tender, romantic yet profoundly realistic as well. As I read, I felt the sadness of the passing of this exceptional man, yet I also felt buoyed by my meeting with him.

There were many passages in the book that I loved, but two stood out so much that I want to share them with you. The first comes from the beginning, and spoke to me in part because it uses the same metaphor, of grief as a landscape, that inspired my own Grief Country. Jamison writes:

Grief, given to all, is a generative and human thing. It provides a path, albeit a broken one, by which those who grieve can find their way. Still, it is grief’s fugitive nature that one does not know at the start that such a path exists. I knew madness well, but I understood little of grief, and I was not always certain which was grief and which was madness. Grief, as it transpires, has its own territory.

At the very close of the book, she observes:

It is in our nature to want to hold on to love; it is grief’s blessing that we come to know that there are limits to our ability to do so. To hold on to love, I had to find a way to capture and transform it. The only way I knew to do this was to write a book, this book, about Richard. It would be about love and what love had brought, about death and what death had taken. I would write that love continues, and grief teaches.

Thank you, Kay Jamison; you are truly not only a doctor but a healer--sometimes a different, and often a more profound, thing.

LETTING GO FOR THE GREATER GOOD

2010-06-12T13:17:00.000-04:00

Like most people, I have found it hard to let go of my late parents' things. My head is absolutely certain that they would not for a minute want me to turn my home into a museum of their every possession (as well, for that matter, of my grandparents' things, which they inherited and passed down in their turn). But my heart doesn't buy it. No matter how trivial the item or how little my parents themselves cared about it, it just feel unloving to give it away.

Over time I have found three things that make this easier, though never easy. The first is practice. The second a digital photograph, a strategy I'll write about in another post. The third is a strategy I've come to think of as "letting go for the greater good"--an overly grandiose name, really, but the best I can do.

Letting go for the greater good just means finding a way to honor some possession, and with it my parents' legacies, more in the giving-away of it than in the holding on. When I make the gift, its purpose, and its effect significant somehow, I feel not just comfortable but even good about letting the object go.

My siblings and I did this with the furniture none of us could fit from my parents' home. We gave those extra pieces, many of which were lovely and all of which were practical, to a young woman who had been living in the SafeSpace shelter and was now moving hereslf and her two kids to a new apartment. There could be no doubt, seeing the joy in her face, that giving these things away was much more meaningful than stuffing them somewhere in our own houses. Indeed, I could feel my mother's joy that the table, for example, that she had served so many loving family meals on would now be helping to make such gatherings possible for another mom who had been left with virtually nothing.

My dad's golf clubs were another sticking point. He dearly loved the game, and his bag and all of its accoutrements were just about impossible for me to let go. Until, at least, a friend had his own clubs stolen recently, right in the midst of a year of other financial challenges. How lovely it felt to give him Dad's gear and with it, a temporary substitute he could use until he had the time or money to replace the stolen clubs. I know Dad would approve. My friend promised to donate any clubs he didn't keep to First Tee, and I promised him that none of Dad's eternal putting "yips" were being passed on with his putter.

I guess all I'm saying, at rather great length, is that it's helpful to remember that hanging onto something may not turn out to be the best way we can honor a loved one's memory. Honoring their spirit, their values, their joys is so much more important than keeping a dining-room chair or a nine-iron. At least, that's the way I'd like to be remembered, and I think my parents would agree.

ON A PLAYFUL NOTE: furniture, forlorn

2010-06-09T10:06:00.000-04:00

This post isn't really meant for you if you're recently bereaved. One's delight in the ridiculous usually takes a while to come back. But it may make you smile if you're somewhere past the absolute worst.

I came across Bill Keaggy's little book Fifty Sad Chairs about a year after my father died. Each of its 4-inch square pages offers a photo of a real chair abandoned in a real place somewhere in St. Louis and photographed exactly as found. A single look at the photos was enough to make me laugh out loud. Keaggy's sad chairs were so sad, so deeply forlorn, so put-upon, so down and out they made the entire concept of sadness feel amusing. Keaggy's brief introduction notes, "You'll see them beside dumpsters, in backyards, in vacant lots and on the sidewalk. These are the forsaken chairs...They saved us from having to sit on the floor. And how do we repay them? With a grunt, a curse, and a heave-ho to the street." If these chairs were characters in Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh, they'd all be Eeyore: depressed, desultory, and deeply under-appreciated.

The image I reprint here is titled "She Never Calls Anymore." It was taken sometime before 2007, when the book was published. Today, not only the chair is gone, but probably the phone booth too. I wonder if Keaggy would consider a book called Fifty Forlorn Phones.

FIRST STEPS, LAST STEPS

2010-06-07T09:33:00.000-04:00

This short poem by American poet Ed Meek made me cry the first time I read it. It seemed to describe my own father before his death: his physical fragility, his emotional courage, his unspoken readiness for the journey to come.

Look at the way the poem links the first steps any of us take, those steps "of a child paddling across the floor in slippers," with our final ones. Maybe the poet is suggesting that however painful a loved one's dying seems to those of us who are left behind, the transition is nevertheless one of wonder and growth for the person taking it.

AT THE END
by Ed Meek

He was so old his bones seemed to swim in his skin.
And when I took his hand to feel his pulse
I felt myself drawn in. It was as faint
as the steps of a child
paddling across the floor in slippers
and yet he was smiling.
I could almost hear a river
running beneath his breath.
The water was clear and cold and deep.
He was ready and willing to wade on in.

2010-05-23T10:16:00.000-04:00

Labors of Love

2010-05-23T09:55:00.000-04:00

I wrote the poem below about a year after my father's death. In thinking about our time together during his last year, it came to me that the image of playing cards was a perfect one for a poem. My father was excellent at all kinds of card games, and also at most anything else that demanded discipline, a dispassionate assessment of odds, and precision. He liked playing with me, partly because he enjoyed teasing me when I lost. And I lost consistently: I take after him in many ways, but none of them have anything to do with numerical skill.

Mirroring the gift he had for counting cards, the poem finds its shape through its numbers. Each new stanza counts either up to or down from seven words; the choice of seven comes from the number of cards in a hand of gin rummy, the game we always played. Making this strict structure worked was a real struggle, for all that the results felt right.

The title to this post, Labors of Love, was originally chosen in reference to the difficulty of making the poem. Only after I first posted did it occur to me that it speaks of the year I describe in the poem far better. Frail, shocked and grieving deeply, Dad soldiered valiantly on for almost exactly a year after my mother's death. He said to me once that he thought Mom wanted him to be brave, and perhaps he sensed as well that his kids would have been devastated had he gone any sooner. Talk about your labors of love.

COUNTING CARDS

Dad
counted cards
instinctively; knew all
my suits and straights,
shaped his own hand perfectly.
Hearts, you might say, had nothing
to do with these games. These contests
were all head: focused, hands down, cunning,
he won almost always. I dithered,
forgot plays, amassed epic losses.
Schnide, he'd crow, zero.
He never tired
of winning,
though
we
played less
that last year.
TV masked Mom's absence
better, and he breathed easier
on his big reclining couch. Now,
though we never said so, our game
was one of patience, hearts take all,
and I was the stronger player
if only because--not young,
just younger--I still
had the will
to win,
or,
you
might say,
to lose. Pain
always ends life's fight,
that's why we like games
like cards. Dad lived almost exactly
twelve months after Mom's death, then fell
and broke his hip; three days later,
he was gone. How are losses counted,
that break both mind and heart? Deal,
plan, shape; break, win
lose; play
on.

© Suzanne Fox 2007