Dear friends,
It has been seven weeks since I sent you a poem–seven weeks since my son chose to take his life. Thank you for all the ways you’ve supported me in this time–prayers, emails, letters, gifts. Though I have been unable to respond to all your kindness with personal notes, please accept my enormous gratitude. Thank you. Thank you for all the love and kindness I have felt surrounding and infusing me–I have never felt alone. I am so grateful for you.
I think I am ready to continue the daily sharing. We’ll see how it goes.
with love,
Rosemerry
Digging Potatoes, 2021
I am not the woman I was
a year ago when my son and I
harvested potatoes. Today
I must look like her—
bare hands in the dirt,
sunhat on. But she did not know
the deep loss of losing a son.
Perhaps she’d imagined it.
That is why she did everything
she could to keep such a loss
from happening. But the woman
I am today knows all too well
what I cannot control.
I plunge my fingers
into the cold earth
and talk to my son
as if he can hear me.
I miss you, I say. And I reminisce
about all the other years
we did this together. I ooh
at the size of the potatoes,
hold them up as if he can see.
What does love care of absence?
Love grows, despite death—
it roots in each cell and insists
on tendrilling, touching everything.
In the middle of the night,
a voice commanded me to remember:
Life needs us to live it.
All day I puzzle over the message.
All day I lean into the words.
I say them out loud as I pull out
potatoes, ask my son what he thinks
it might mean. No reply. He has become
one with life now in a way
I cannot yet understand.
And so I breathe into it, this chapter
of loss, this life needing me to live it.
All around me, inside me,
I notice how so much is changing, notice
in each moment, a new invitation.
Rosemerry, how amazing it is to read your thoughts on this difficult subject, to see you incorporate your daily tasks and continued grief into poetry. You are amazing and your poetry is worth waiting for–take your time in returning fully–we will be here, ready to receive your words, whenever you can offer them.
Years of practice, years of love, with what instruments have you raised yourself, and us?
Beautiful, Rosemerry.I can tell that you will find your way to healing, are on the way, just from reading this poem. In the fullness of time, you will feel your son reside in your heart, and will carry him forward in your life.
As schmooley said, take all the time you need – we will be here.
And potatoes are nightshades, spending their lives rooted underground—then brought into the light, thence (oft-times) returned to dark, shaded cool cellars.
Poem, poetess, potatoes, life—are they each/all nightshades?
The pain of suicide continues to reverberate throughout my life, even though it happened in 1969. I appreciate your wrestling with it in words.
“What does love care of absence?
Love grows, despite death”
So true. It has always been hard for me to understand past tense when speaking of love for one who has died. “I love him” is as apt, as necessary and true as ever. “I loved him” is the lie.
“Life needs us to live it.” You are showing us how to do that Rosemerry, even when life is not what we want it to be. Thank you for your generosity. much love to you xoxo
Rosemerry, I believe Finn helped you harvest every one of those potatoes! Welcome back sweetie, I really missed you…
thank you, dear friend, thank you. Yes, I believe it, too.
[…] the potatoes in her the garden without her son, and I’m verklempt when they surface in the first poem she writes, seven weeks after his death. […]