I thought I was holding grief.
Tonight I see grief is holding me.
Not with a vice grip. Not with a fist.
More the way gravity
holds the earth to the sun—
a force without which our planet
would lose all warmth, all life.
Love has many names. Grief is one,
and I am grateful tonight for the way
it tethers me not only to pain but
to beauty, goodness, connection.
Tonight I see grief not as a problem
to be solved but as an energy to explore,
to move with, to circle what is beloved.
There is some comfort even in knowing
it will never let me go. It is right that it
should hold me, even as I turn and turn.
Posts Tagged ‘grief’
Orbit
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged gravity, grief, holding, orbit on March 4, 2026| 6 Comments »
Tender Astronomy
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged grief, Jack Ridl, kyra, star on February 20, 2026| 4 Comments »
with thanks to Jack Ridl
The day after she died,
Jack wrote to me.
Pick one star each night.
Name it Kyra.
Stare briefly toward it.
Say good, very good night.
His words became
a constellation,
a way to navigate the dark.
Sometimes, like now,
when I can’t see the stars,
I find one inside me.
Name it Kyra.
I say good, very good night.
Then I thank Jack.
For that moment,
everything is star.
After I Fell in the Canyon of Grief
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged acceptance, canyon, falling, grace, grief, surrender on January 7, 2026| 7 Comments »
we discover that falling in the canyon is our initiation
—Mark Nepo, “The Life After Tears”
I didn’t land. I fell and I fell and I fell.
At first as I plummeted, I feared the landing,
imagining an imminent crash. Then,
I fell through nights and middays. Fell through
kitchen floors and highways. Fell through
birthdays and Saturdays. Fell until the sense
of groundlessness was so familiar it no longer
felt like peril. I don’t know when I stopped falling.
There was no splat. No splash. No crushing of bones.
No sense of arrival. In fact, I am not certain
I am done with my falling. But I do know now
the falling is not something to be feared.
Not that we grow wings. This is not about flying.
It’s about falling. About meeting the gravity
and feeling its force and letting it carry me
in ways I have never before let myself be carried.
Now I know that the canyon of grief is
just another name for living the fullest life.
The reward for the falling is to no longer
expect a reward. The reward of falling is to
learn to not resist the falling. The reward of falling
is to feel how grace falls with us as if holding
our hand, like a teacher, like a friend.
How It Comes Out
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged feeling, flame, friendship, grief, love, sorrow on January 4, 2026| 10 Comments »
I don’t know why sometimes
the same story can feel like ash
in the mouth and another time
like flame. Each time the story
is the same, but sometimes,
it scorches to share it.
I am thinking of today, how I read
a poem about your death
as if there were no more fuel to burn,
reciting a fact, as if saying,
There is no snow in the yard.
Five minutes later, I read the same
poem and had to restart four times
just to get past the first two lines.
I prefer the flame. Prefer to be moved
by how much you’ve changed me.
Not to dwell in the loss, but not
to shy from being torched by love.
After Reaching for You
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged dream, grief, memory, stillness on December 20, 2025| 6 Comments »
for Finn
There was a list. We were laughing.
This is all I remember as first light
enters the windows, slips
somehow through closed lids.
I keep my eyes closed in hopes
that if I am still enough I can grasp
an image tendril of the dream
and tug it closer.
For hours, it doesn’t work.
When I stop reaching, what is here
are real memories of you—your
head bent over the table doing math,
how jealous you were of your sister’s
snowman stuffy, the way your feet hung
over the end of almost every bed.
Is it true all I had to do was stop reaching
for the dream so that whole skeins
of memories could unravel and wrap
me in their long, faithful strands?
Is it true being still is now the best
way I can hold you? I am still.
Somehow in the softening, I don’t feel
your hand here in my open hand, but I do.
The Talisman
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged dad, daughter, grief, love, protection on December 2, 2025| 7 Comments »
It wasn’t the time he taught me to ride
without training wheels. Wasn’t fishing
on the lake for crappies or hunting
in the Wisconsin woods for squirrels.
Wasn’t the cassette tapes he made me
when I moved away from home or the rare tears
he cried when I left. It wasn’t the way
he forgave me when I forgot to call
on his fiftieth birthday. Wasn’t the white
sweater he bought me the year before he died
because he said I looked so beautiful in it.
Or maybe it was all those things—everything
he did, everything he was, every quiet touch and
unsung sacrifice ,so I never once doubted his love.
His love as solid as he was. His love stained me.
Can never be removed, no matter how fiercely
the world tries to scrub me of hope.
Every day I take in the violent raids,
the infinite ways we defile and dismiss
and destroy each other. And still I can’t unknow
his love, can’t untrust we are capable
of such goodness, such unflinching generosity.
His love, the talisman I wear in every cell.
It protects me not from the horror, but
from the error of believing the horror is all.
There is also how he hummed to me
when I was scared. How he cheered for me,
even when I failed. How in my most vulnerable
hours, he held me and whispered my name.
Sometimes Grief Looks Like This
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged belonging, forest, grief on November 19, 2025| 4 Comments »
The woman walks into the woods.
How beautiful, she thinks, though
on closer look, all around her
the woods sprawl in wild disarray.
Fallen logs decompose, wood rots,
decays. Bark peels. Brambles scramble.
Berries darken and shrivel. Moss drops off
in great chunks. Broken sticks hang
from broken branches. And all of it belongs.
She thinks how messy grief can be.
The barbed thorns of anger, vast thickets
of I don’t know. Most times there is
no trail at all. Why did she think
human nature would be any different from
nature itself? Oh this messy humaning.
She tells herself, All belongs. All belongs.
The more she believes it, the more she feels
the forest inside her, witnesses how the more
it stretches, the more it rots, the more it grows.
Going Fishing with Dad Four Years After His Death
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ars poetica, dad, fishing, grief on November 19, 2025| 5 Comments »
Dear Dad,
Yesterday I met a man who went fishing.
It was sleety, bracing, gray.
He went fishing anyway. Actually,
as you would say, he went “catching.”
Just one fish, he said, but I felt his gladness,
the modest kind that does not
depend on good weather, the gladness
we feel when we follow the pull
of what we love. Like how I find pleasure
in writing, even when the conditions
are heartache and loss. Even then,
there’s pleasure in standing in the river
of the moment, my whole body attuned,
waiting for the tug. It made me feel close to you dad,
the way his face lit up, just as yours used to
when the talk turned to what was biting.
And now writing to you about my day,
it’s like I’ve cast a line to you. The rain
in here tastes like salt, but oh the gladness
when I feel it on your end, the tug.