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Posts Tagged ‘grief’

 Sometimes Grief Looks Like This 

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , 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.
 

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Going Fishing with Dad Four Years After His Death

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , 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.

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The Mirror

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on November 17, 2025| 12 Comments »

Overnight, every red leaf on the maple tree
has fallen to the ground and formed
an imperfect pool of red around
the solemn trunk, the dark bare limbs.
This is how it was the day you died.
In an instant, the tree of me went
from radiance to nakedness.
Impossible to hide.
Years later, I see what I couldn’t
see then—how beautiful to be that bare
when all that is lost is still so close,
when the limbs of the body
still remember the exact texture
and weight of what they once held.
How sacred that nakedness,
that opens us to the world.
I have grown so many new leaves.
That sacredness has never left.

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Just Before the Grief Retreat

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on November 16, 2025| 6 Comments »

What if it’s like baseball,
Paula says, and you enter
the room the way the players
enter the field, with a theme song?
I look around the spacious room,
chairs and cushions set in a large circle,
flowers, candles and tissues in the center.
What if, when everyone is already
sitting in the circle, you kick open
the door and make an entrance
to this? And she pulls up a tune
on her phone. It begins slow—
strings and cello.
“Funky Town?”
She laughs as I strut
to the center of the room,
knees bent and flapping,
arms pumping in the air
to legato orchestral disco.
I welcome the invisible crowds.
No ball, no bat, no ump, no score.
But there is this field where we gather
to meet what life throws at us.
There are these innings of loss,
these home runs of love, curve balls of ache.
There is this sacred diamond with facets
that light up when we talk about it,
talk about it, talk about it, talk about it,
these gifts when we realize
we are not at all behind in the count.
Oh my broken open heart, I think,
you don’t gotta move on.
You are right where you need to be.

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When Bert Sends Me an Mp4

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on October 29, 2025| 6 Comments »


 
 
Though she’s been dead more than a year,
Donna sings to me through the recording,
her voice bold as she belts into Ladder Canyon
a song of celebration and goodbye.
The cancer by then was a longtime companion.
She laughs as the lyrics bounce off of sandstone,
and then she starts leaving space for listening:
And all I’ve done      (   I’ve done      I’ve done  )
for want of wit      (  of wit      of wit   ).
When the first verse is sung, she exclaims,
“That was fantastic!” Years later, the echo
resounds, though it comes in the sound
of my own voice pealing around my own room,
“That was fantastic!”  I shout back. And it was.
Fantastic to feel her again in the drums of my ears,
in the hum of my throat, in the thrum of my blood.
Fantastic to hear her singing those words we have sung
together how many thousands of times. But this time,
Donna’s not singing to blend. She’s shouting it out
like a shanty, haunted by shadows and lit up by life.
I’m so stunned by her voice, I don’t even try to sing along.
I absorb every wave of her, as if I could take her all in
and not have to give her back to death.
I play it again and again. Every time, I echo back,
“That was fantastic.” And by that, I mean the echo
in the canyon. I mean the song. I mean the gift
of hearing her voice again. Fantastic. I mean her life.
Fantastic. I mean her. I mean her. I mean her.

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Eyesight

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on October 21, 2025| 9 Comments »

 
I’ve never seen the world the bee sees,
a world of iridescence in which petals
change color depending on the angle,
a world in which a field of sunflowers appear
not as a smear of yellow but as individual
blooms. I’ve never seen the bullseye
pattern in the primrose or the pansy,
these human eyes unable to perceive
designs in UV light. Today I look out
at the empty garden where just last week
there were marigolds and calendula,
and I see the absence of flowers, but also,
I see mounds of golds, yellows, oranges, and
I see the boy who used to sit on the edge
of the wooden beds and I see the young
version of me, not yet gray, weeding
the rows, while the boy tells me stories
about school and the things he longs
for beyond what he has. They’re there,
I know, the flowers, the woman,
the boy, though somehow they’re so far
beyond the spectrum not even
the bees can see them.

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The Holding  

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on September 15, 2025| Leave a Comment »


 
The way the shore holds the pond,
that is how I want to hold
the pain in my heart, honoring
how vital it is. How it is home
to things with hard shells and sharp
claws and also to beings with gossamer
wings. To drain it would be to lose
my aliveness. To become barren,
cracked, dry. I can’t say I love
the spider-like skaters that streak
across the top, nor the thick gray muck
that lines the bottom. But I love
the green rushes that rim the edges,
the red-stemmed willows, the wild
iris. It is no easy thing to hold pain,
but I look how vibrant the pond shore is.
This alive is how I want to live.

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As It All Comes Down

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on September 13, 2025| Leave a Comment »


 
 
On the day his brother died,
we walked, mostly silent.
The old aspen trees were tall
and dead. In a meadow, we found
a single yellow flower where almost
all else was brown. The air carried
the wild scent of elk, dank, sweet.
And the wind made of dry grass
an epiphany of sound.
But it was the quiet landscape
inside us that was most changed.
In a voice so bare I could hardly hear,
he said, These are the days
that bring us closer together.

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On the Eve of His 21st Birthday

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on September 11, 2025| 18 Comments »


 
 
There is a joy that chases sadness
and sometimes overtakes it, as if
the two are racing down a hill,
their shadows sometimes merging—
and this is how a woman looking at a photo
of her son when he was still alive,
his face radiant with elation,
might find herself not knowing
if her tears are made of gratefulness
or sorrow, two parallel emotions
that sometimes twine inside us.
Nor does it matter to her.
Gratefulness. Sorrow. It seems right
she should weep either way.
Both feelings are fashioned from love.
She is here for all of it.
The salt tastes just the same.

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Those of Us Who Choose to Turn Toward Grief

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on September 3, 2025| 6 Comments »


 
 
Somehow we find each other,
though our gathering
doesn’t fix or change the loss,
there is tenderness, even beauty,
in coming together. I have read
in Switzerland it’s illegal to own
just one guinea pig.
It’s considered animal abuse
because they are social beings.
We, too, are social beings.
Perhaps we don’t sniff and nudge
and squeak and rumble strut,
but we cradle, we hum, we hold.
We whisper soft encouragement.
Light candles. Offer tissues. Hug.
There are times when I deeply need
to be alone with my grief. Even then,
curled into myself, quiet in a quiet dark room,
even then I am held by the certainty
I am not alone. What a gift we give
to ourselves, to each other,
when, in our grief, we enter
the circle of those who grieve
and meet each other with open hands
and say I see you, brother, I see you,
sister. I know it isn’t easy. Here I am.

—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

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