And there on the statement,
between the hardware store expense
and the do-it-yourself car wash,
was the charge
for Henderson and Sons Funeral Home.
How to reconcile this tide of loss?
Nowhere in my books
is a column for devastation.
No account for anguish,
for the loss of a slender young man
who loved ice cream
and cherries and helped me
roast pumpkins for pie.
There’s no way this number
on the statement can equate
to the boy who threw rocks in the river,
who snuggled with me
on the couch before school,
who built cars out of cardboard
and shish kebob sticks.
I can’t make it equal the seventeen years
we swam and hiked and baked
and sang—nor the years
he wept and raged and ached,
those years I learned how to pray.
In these unmoored days,
when I am more driftwood than boat,
I float through the churning wreckage of hope
and beg myself, stay open.
I lack the callous math
for such reconciliations.
I sob into the columns,
and the heart takes the lead—
it knows nothing of counting, of sums.
It knows only to love, to love.
Archive for October, 2021
Reconciling
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged death, loss, math, mother, reconciling, son on October 12, 2021| 18 Comments »
Invitation to Do Something Kind
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged secret agents of change on October 11, 2021| 2 Comments »
Hey friends, as some of you know, I am a co-leader of Secret Agents of Change–a surreptitious kindness cabal. My amazing co-leader, Sherry Richert Belul, suggested we do a special secret mission in my son Finn’s honor. We hope you will join us on Wednesday for Operation: Finn.
What does this entail? We will do a live zoom call on Wednesday morning, 8:30 Mountain Time, in which I will read a poem and then Sherry will offer a simple prompt based on the poem that will send you out into the world with love and purpose. If you are interested in signing up, you can visit here: https://simplycelebrate.net/secret-agents-of-change/ . Sherry will send out a link to the zoom meeting.
OR
If you can’t make it to our live gathering, you can find the poem and prompt later that day at our Secret Agents of Change FaceBook page.
In either case, we invite all secret agents to report back on our FaceBook page–you can share how you carried out your mission. It’s wonderful to read how other people have gone into the world to share love. I hope you’ll join us. It’s fun and free and life- and love-affirming.
Waxing
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged broken, death, loss, moon, parenting, son on October 11, 2021| 8 Comments »
Moon broken, my son said
when he was two,
and he pointed east
to the quarter moon.
Mommy fix it.
He believed I could.
I wanted to believe it, too,
wanted to believe
I could fix any broken thing—
the loose button on a doll,
the ripped page in a book,
a scraped up knee,
a tattered dream.
Tonight I gaze
at the low crescent moon.
I have lost my belief
in fixing.
Count me among
the broken things.
And my son is gone.
And my son is gone.
And the beautiful moon slips lower
into the almost dark.
Physics of Grief
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged grief, igbo, mother, peace, physics, son on October 10, 2021| 8 Comments »
Before I could feel grief’s full weight,
love came to meet it, and though love did not
take away the grief, not even a picogram,
it dispersed the grief into its smallest bits,
as if to increase the surface area interface
so now every single atom of grief
is surrounded, is cushioned by love.
My friend offers me words in Igbo.
Udo diri, he says. There is peace, somehow.
How, when my bright beamish boy is dead?
Yet here in the unlikely physics of grief,
love holds so tenderly each smallest bit,
and somehow, my boy, can you feel it? peace.
Short List of Wonders
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged belief, death, faith, miracle, mother, wonder on October 8, 2021| 13 Comments »
Years from now,
I want to remember
the way tears
became white doves
and flew away,
the way stepping stones
appeared to help me
cross an impossible
river, the way
a crumpled letter arrived
from the dead
to proclaim
I am surrounded with joy.
Oh woman who lives
in my skin years from now,
don’t try to pretend
it didn’t happen.
It did. A rainbow
blossomed above
your shoulder.
Your head opened up
to receive golden light.
Life wrapped its strong hands
around your heart.
And when you asked
your son, Are you close,
you felt against your ribs
a knocking
from the inside.
After Reading a Romance at Midnight
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged book, death, love, mother, romance, son, tragedy on October 7, 2021| 7 Comments »
For two hours, I am the woman
who works at the orphanage, the woman
who falls in love with a man from India
who is not who he says he is.
He and I make love for hours beneath a mirror,
twining our limbs in a sea of silk,
and he shows me the pleasure
of losing the stories I’ve told myself
about what is possible with love.
When, after many pages,
we arrive at happily ever after,
I find myself on the couch in my kitchen,
notice my own thick legs curled beneath me,
my own raw heart in my tired chest
doing its faithful work. I’m surprised
to return to my own story:
the woman who is grieving—
the woman alone
in the empty room who listens
for the voice that isn’t there,
who listens for footsteps that do not come.
For the last two hours, I had forgotten her,
had forgotten this woman
whose story I know as my own,
this woman who lost her son.
I had forgotten the ache she carries,
the constant throb. And though it cuts,
though it wounds,
I am so grateful to return to her life,
to her story—the story
of how she gave her everything
to someone she loved,
how she knows he loved her, too.
It’s not a story she had wanted to live,
but now that it’s hers
she would never give up a page
of their story. Not a single word.
*
this poem has been published in ONE ART
From the Inside
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged automatic nervous system, death, grief, love on October 6, 2021| 6 Comments »
In these days when the torrents of grief flood deep,
when sorrow pools like blood on the floor,
in these days when I can do nothing but meet this moment,
when I am too spent to say hello,
love comes to meet me where I am.
It holds me while I cry. It cradles me where I sit.
It steps with me as I walk. There was, at first,
a moment when I tried to push it away,
alarmed by this onslaught of love.
Too much, I protested, arms up in resistance,
but love obliterated my no.
It moved in to hold me from the inside,
slipped into my tissue, my bones,
it infused itself into each tiny cell, each organelle,
and made inside me a home. Since that moment,
I am never alone. Now it is love that moves my hand.
Love that shapes each word. Love that helps me rise.
Love that pours the tea.
Love that wakes with me in the middle of the night.
Autonomic love that makes the heart beat,
autonomic love that makes the lungs breathe.
autonomic love that meets the impossible grief
and surrounds it with an impossible grace.
Love that grips me around the heart
as if to save me from drowning.
Love that murmurs again and again,
I’ve got you, Sweetheart, I’ve got you.
Saint Francis and Sister Death
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged acceptance, death, mother, saint francis, son on October 6, 2021| 15 Comments »
As Francis lay dying
in his humble hut,
he wrote a praise poem
that honored Sister Death.
And when death came
to dance with him,
he did not shun her
nor shame her nor
push her away.
He embraced her
the way he embraced
the sun, the wind,
the water, the air.
He claimed her as family,
as dance partner, guide.
Oh Francis, here
in the hut of my heart
is a wooden box of ashes
about the size of a baby.
I can cradle it, carry it,
sway with it slow
the way I once did
with the boy in the box, now dust,
the boy the coroner
swaddled in white.
I did not want this dance.
I stumble. I trip.
I am awkward, ungainly.
Sister Death is certain, serene.
I would have barred
the doors if I could have, Francis,
but now she walks with me,
sleeps with me, makes
dinner and cleans with me.
There is no locking her out.
She brings me the costliest gifts:
Trust in life. Immeasurable love.
Perfume of the great mystery.
I tell her I’d trade them all back
for my son. She whispers,
Oh, sister. Dance with me.
New Mantra
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged grief, mantra, meeting the moment, okay on October 5, 2021| 7 Comments »
To this day with its deepening whirlpools of grief,
I say okay. Okay to the way I am swirled
and pulled down. Okay to the thick muscled sorrow.
Okay to the throat with its clenching, its tightness.
Okay to the ambush of tears.
On this day when saying yes to the world
is too shiny, too perky, too yes, too bright,
on this day with its churning currents of pain,
on this day when there is no clear path forward
at least I do not say no.
Okay, I say, as I pull on my clothes. Okay,
I say, as I don’t make the call. Okay
is my life vest, my life raft, my passage.
I’m grateful it isn’t a verb. Okay.
Okay. Okay, I say, blessed by its unstriving truth.
Okay, I say as the whirlpool spits me out.
Okay as another pulls me down again.
How
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, grief, love on October 4, 2021| 13 Comments »
I did not know how beautiful,
grief could be, how generous—
like an improvised cello sonata
in a minor key, a melody
that leaps and wails, unfurls
into harmonic bloom
and makes the whole body
tremble. There is a purity
in it—a sweetness that says
you are here and I will hold you
as long as you meet me.
When others tell me
they wish they could take
some fraction of the pain,
I thank them and I mean it,
but I would not let them
take even the tiniest portion.
To meet grief is to be
deeply steeped in love,
to know the self as wildly alive,
tugged apart by beauty, by loss.
And grief draws its bow
across the strings of the moment—
sonorous and lyrical.
Oh this sensuous rush of the world.
And how is it through tears, through ache,
through breathtaking pain,
I find myself saying thank you?
Digging Potatoes, 2021
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged changing, garden, life, love, parenting, potatoes, son on October 3, 2021| 10 Comments »
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.