after Jim Harrison, “Seven in the Woods”
Yesterday, I was seven, swimming
in the lake. Thin prickly seaweed strands
winding around my legs. I would do anything
not to touch the silty bottom. Bullheads
lived there with their slimy dark skin
and strange thick whiskers. On the surface,
I was sleek and playful, baring my skin
to Wisconsin sunshine, splashing
and being splashed by my brother,
crawling through waves with wild joy,
my arms slicing through green water,
my strokes strong and quick.
Almost fifty years later, I feel it,
the welcoming warmth at the lake’s surface,
the cooler layers deeper below.
I remember the simple pleasure
of the dead man’s float,
a seven-year-old girl playing with how to die.
What did I know of death then,
except that it meant to hold my breath,
to let my body be held, a game,
really, just another way to play,
like Marco Polo, like racing to the raft.
The stakes feel so much higher, now.
Death not a friend, exactly, but
a companion nonetheless.
I channel her back, that seven year old,
remember her fear of the depths.
The bottom’s not so bad, I want to tell her.
You can be playful with death, she giggles back.
Posts Tagged ‘death’
Seven in the Lake
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aging, childhood, death, lake, play, swimming on October 6, 2026| 4 Comments »
In Which I Dream of Being with You and Your Late Husband
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged blessing, death, dream, friendship, god, grief, knitting, love on October 3, 2026| 9 Comments »
for LB
In the dream, I hand him a skein
of evergreen yarn. He cups his palms
below it as if receiving communion,
then squeezes the fine wool,
testing its softness, its strength.
Finding it worthy, he nods at me
as I offer you the half-knitted hat,
the yarn still attached to the needles,
the other end of the yarn held in his palms.
He looks at you, so loving, so tender,
looks at the slender green strand between you
and smiles before unwinding the yarn
to give you more length, more length.
This morning, the dream still wrapped around me,
I imagine you not as Penelope, knitting
and unknitting to prolong your time. Instead,
I see you have made of the yarn a swing,
a pendulum tethered to devotion that allows you
to play and soar between realms, and the god
of swings and the god of skeins, and
the god of play and the god of love and the god
of green and the god of dreams are the same
good god, and every one of them is whispering
bless you, bless you, bless you.
In the Noticing
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged absence, connection, death on August 11, 2026| 10 Comments »
Quiet as a rabbit
nibbling on grass,
obvious as a flicker
knocking on a tree,
surprising as a white feather
landing on my tights,
again and again,
you appear, or more truly,
again and again,
I see what has
always been here—
you in everything,
your absence
throbbing with life.
The Gift
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged death, fragile, love, suicide on December 12, 2025| 2 Comments »
for B
The day after you died,
everyone was you.
Every man behind a counter,
every woman on a phone,
every child, every grandmother,
every stranger in the airport,
every driver on the highway.
Every voice was your voice.
Every face was your face.
Who else, I wondered, was
certain they could not live
another moment? Not knowing
the answer, I imagined love
carrying all our fragile,
floating hearts. I had never
been more certain of
the holiness of everyone.
This, the gift you gave me.
When I arrived home, I lit
a candle. It was your name
I said into the flame,
wishing you peace.
It was you I wept for,
you I wished for.
And you were everyone.
The Change
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aging, beauty, change, death, flowers, frost, garden on October 5, 2025| 14 Comments »
Overnight, the frost
took every pink zinnia
every creamy dahlia,
fading their colors to brown.
The nasturtiums have slumped
into dense wilted tangle.
The marigolds hold themselves tall
in a blackened and upright
surrender. For now,
the bright, fresh bouquets
I made yesterday are still
bright and fresh in their vases.
This beauty, we know, won’t stay.
The message is simple:
All that rises passes away.
I see it in these hands
that planted and watered
and weeded and picked—
my skin now wrinkled and thin
as frost-withered petals.
Here: the chance to witness
my own rising and passing.
How natural to age, to die.
The flowers in the vase will wilt.
With every day, so do I.
Such strange gift. First
the joy of putting the self
in service to making something
beautiful. Then, beyond joy,
the grace in learning to let it all go.
Learning to Treasure What’s Here
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged death, garden, gratefulness, life, rose on July 23, 2025| 6 Comments »
I believed I had lost it,
the rose bush I planted last year,
what, with the way it died back
after that hard spring frost.
Died all the way to the ground.
Every stem turned brown.
Was it for hope or laziness
I didn’t dig out the roots?
This year, the rose stayed dead
until one day, green. More green.
Then burgeoning, vibrant green.
And now flowers, so many flowers,
flowers of palest pink. The scent
greets me at the garden gate
every time I enter. How precious
it has become to me, this treasure.
Not because I thought it had died,
but because now I remember
it will.
Tale of Two Moments
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged daughter, death, love, memory, mortality, mother, parenting on January 24, 2025| 2 Comments »
Holding my girl
on the couch,
came a moment
so tender because
I remembered
I will die—
what grace when,
minutes later,
lost in the bliss
of her warmth,
came a moment
so tender because
I forgot.
I, Who Did Not Die That Day
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged allowing, death, love, parts, resilience on January 17, 2025| 23 Comments »
“I, who did not die …”
—Naomi Shihab Nye, “Making a Fist”
I, who did not die that day,
also died. Not all of me,
but part of me: The part
who believed I could change things
beyond my control.
The part who believed
any of us can save someone else.
What a terrible freedom to know
what I cannot do. The part
who did not die is the part
who loves—loves what was,
loves what is now, loves as long
as I am able to love.
The part who did not die
is the part who still thrills to see
the twitchy-nosed bunny
streak across the grass
and the near-full moon that bathes
me in cold blue light. The part
who still lives is not afraid to grieve
and lets herself be turned
toward fear and learns,
learns to meet even heartache
with wonder. Like a tree, I grow
from the soil of all I have lost.
I, who did not die that day,
am still being taught how to touch
the wound and let myself be sung
by the part still wildly alive.
Permanent
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged death, grief, tattoo on August 13, 2024| 10 Comments »
It will not last,
this tattoo on my wrist
of a swirling comet
and two fixed stars.
The stain of henna
will fade, will diminish.
Not like his death,
which teaches me
forever every day.
But his life is ever here,
tattooed into my blood.
Every pulse remembers
how he entered my world
and changed everything.
There is no ink so enduring
as love.
Still Learning to Pray
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged altar, death, oak, spring on June 1, 2024| 4 Comments »
The night the scrub oak leaves emerged
was the night the temperature dropped
to twenty two degrees. Whatever had dared
to unfurl has become a brown and brittle thing.
I put these, too, on the altar of the day—
not just the flax flowers purple and thriving,
not just the greens of the sedge, the rush,
but also the barren branches of oak
with their lack of growth, their shriveled hope.
The dead invite us into the mystery
every bit as much as the living.
I carry the gray sticks like a sparse bouquet.
The woody scent lingers on my hands.
Death Writes to Rosemerry
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged death, epistle on November 4, 2023| 6 Comments »
Sweetheart,
don’t think I didn’t notice
how you woke this morning,
your body humming with life.
Don’t think I didn’t thrill with you
in the ecstasy of breath,
the astonishment you felt
in your own being.
I, too, love the lilt of inhale,
the rush of exhale,
but oh, dear woman,
I will teach you to love
the sweet deep calm in between,
that kingdom of stillness
that touches eternity.
Don’t ask me questions
I cannot answer for you.
I will come for you when I come,
and you will come with me.
But even now I shape you,
even now when you
are so in love with life,
even now as you find
a new slant of light to sit in,
even now as you tremble,
pulsing with promises
you have no idea if you can keep,
even now as you throb with joy,
as you ache with love.
Even now, I shape you,
even now.
This Is How
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged amygdala, autumn, brain, death, scent on October 25, 2023| 8 Comments »
It’s the chill air, say the scientists,
that allows the nose to delineate
the musky smell of autumn,
not like the warm summer air
that traps and mashes
all the aromatic molecules together.
No, it’s the constricting nature of cold
that lets us pick out the sweet loam
of dried grass and peaty scent of sugars
breaking down in the leaves.
But it’s memory that says,
Isn’t this smell wonderful.
It’s the amygdala that relates it
to the childhood joy
of skipping through gutters of oak leaves
and the adult joy of jumping
in great piles of cottonwood leaves
with my son.
In this golden moment,
I’m every age I’ve ever been in the fall,
and every version of me basks
in low autumn light. This is how
I breathe in the fragrance of death
and decay and moldering,
and think isn’t it wonderful, this life.
On the Birthday of a Beloved Who Is Gone
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged birthday, death, love on September 10, 2023| 20 Comments »
for Finn Thilo Trommer, September 11, 2004-August 14, 2021
Though you said yes to something
that was not this life, your birthday
is no less a celebration. Though you
are not here to blow out candles,
not here to wake with balloons,
though you are here as disappearance,
though I meet this day with tears,
my heart still rises to revel in ways
your life still changes my life,
your life still changes the world.
It will never be finished, this love.
It will never be finished, this learning
what it is to be born, to die,
to live into ourselves, to choose love
again and again. Though tears.
Though ache. Though crumple. Though clench.
It will never be finished, this practice
of remembering love. Again. And again.
The Swirl
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged death, dream, grief, son on August 13, 2023| 29 Comments »
We’re traveling together, you,
me, your father, your sister. And
we’re laughing. You’re talking
about your classes for college,
and you’re nervous about seeing
a girl again, and I have this bright feeling
that you’ve passed some threshold.
You’re a firecracker, wild with potential,
and I can’t understand this swirl of worry
that churns through me like smoke.
It’s only after you race down the concourse
showing off your speed,
arms pumping, legs a blur,
your body quick and slender verb,
it’s only then when you don’t come back
I remember you already made a choice to die,
and in the dream I wail, battered again
by the bludgeon of immediate loss.
When I wake, I’m still wearing
the sweet perfume of promise and hope,
even as tears slip hot to the sheets.
It’s not easy, today, to rise, to step
into this world of heartache and courage,
this world you left, this world I love.
Almost Two Years After Your Death
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged death, grief, love, presence on July 15, 2023| 12 Comments »
I no longer pick up the phone to call you.
No longer expect you to walk in the room.
Eventually, the brain learns to expect
the absence, the ears learn to expect
the silence, the body grows accustomed
to the loss of your body and recalibrates
itself in space. But the heart, broken open,
is as full as it ever was.
Did I think it would be parched?
Now I know love as a wellspring,
a continual supply.
Never once has the heart felt empty.
There, every time I look, I find you.
On My Father’s Birthday
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged daughter, death, father, love on July 6, 2023| 6 Comments »
He was a big man,
and I loved the way
he would carry me—
swoop me up
in his strong arms
and float me around
the room.
Now that he is gone,
I carry the weight
of his love—
the enormity—
only to realize
he is still
carrying me.
New Trust
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged death, life, life after death, signs, trust on May 7, 2023| 5 Comments »
When the tiny white feather
floats above me in 17B,
when the full rainbow appears
as I drive from the airport,
when I feel inside me
a swelling, an opening door,
the rational part of me says,
it’s just coincidence,
but another part wades deep
in the currents of mystery
until I float on the waves
of what I do not understand—
they swirl me between worlds,
carry me homeward.
One Impossible Hug
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged body, death, hug, loss, love on February 25, 2023| 4 Comments »
my arms still recall
the slender stem of your body—
oh, sweet empty circumference
One Without a Path
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged death, love, mother, path on February 8, 2023| 7 Comments »
no footsteps, no matter
there is nowhere, not even death,
where my love will not follow