Delivered at the Telluride High School Graduation, June 2, 2023 I don’t know how to make sense of the story of how Finn is here, although he is not. How he lives in the deep soil of memory— still running with you through the playground your bodies bright streaks of joy, cartwheeling across the green valley floor and tap dancing on this stage, traveling with you to Mesa Verde and Ecuador and building computers and graphing equations and writing code, swinging golf clubs and debating politics and dressing as a skyscraper in the Halloween parade. Laughing in the hall and crying in his room. I don’t know how it is we can crumple with grief and still rise with hope, love, celebration. And yet we do. At the same time he is missed, you, friends, grow more fully into yourselves each one of you a sapling reaching not only toward light but also reaching with your roots through the dark, the necessary dark that anchors us, keeps us rooted in what’s real. I don’t know how it is we come to know our own lives better because he took his, but we do. We learn to trust that despite a great wound, we can thrive, the way a tree grows around a gash, trunk still strong, though a scar remains, leaves still unfurling to gather sun. I don’t know how we speak of sadness and joy in the same breath, but we do. Joy in coming together. Joy in knowing heartbreak invites us to become more spacious, more kind. Joy in forging new dreams. Joy in remembering the world as it was and at the same time growing so bravely, so beautifully into the world that is. |
Posts Tagged ‘loss’
A Letter to the Graduates
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged graduation, grief, joy, loss, paradox, suicide on June 2, 2023| 12 Comments »
Momentary Altar
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged altar, loss, pause, remember on May 23, 2023| 12 Comments »
On the altar of sunset,
I place the scent of lilacs
we used to pick every year
to give your teachers
on the last day of school.
I place the sound of the river
where we used to stand on the banks
and throw rocks for the joy of the splash.
I place the wild and vibrant
green of spring
and the new paths your father
has mowed in the field.
I place the ponderosa tree
now taller than you were when you died
and the golden light at the end of the valley.
I place my own naked heart.
Everywhere is an altar,
a place to remember you.
The pond. The driveway. The field.
Everywhere a place to pause,
to wish you well, to tell you
I remember. I remember.
You were here. You are here.
I remember.
A Blessing
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged dream, grief, loss, love, presence, time on March 20, 2023| 8 Comments »
In the dream, you are ten
and your slender body
curls into my side. We
lie on a purple bed.
Our awareness wings
at the edge of sleep,
our bodies more stone
than bird, your head
on my arm as heavy as time,
and I think, I love this
sweet sapling boy.
In the dream, you are alive,
and I sink all the way
into the sweetness
of the moment
the way I sometimes don’t
in life. I sink full weight
into the tender present
and no part of me wishes
to be anywhere but
in the low golden dream light,
your body warm and gentled,
my body quiet and easy.
Two days later,
I feel it still, the heft of love
unending and generous
close against my side.
It invites me to be more here
with the ones I am with.
With that same arm that held you,
I hold them. Time lifts.
Changing Wavelengths
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged logic, loss, mystery, rainbow, wonder on March 6, 2023| 10 Comments »
The day after you died,
your dad and I stood
on a sidewalk in Georgia
and everything was strange—
I barely knew I was in a body.
I was so in my body.
The muggy air was unfamiliar.
With every sob, I pulled it
into my lungs and it became me.
What I remember:
The sound of airplanes.
The sweet scent of flowering trees.
There were no cars on the road.
It had rained and the night
had not yet come and there,
in the distance, a double rainbow.
I’m a logical woman. I know
what happens when sunlight
enters raindrops in front of me
at a precise angle of forty-two degrees.
And yet.
No one could ever convince me
it wasn’t you, you who had become
more spectral than flesh,
an optical illusion that doesn’t exist
in a specific spot, but, for any who look,
they cannot help but see the real
and radiant truth of it.
To this day, I remember how
those twin rainbows stitched me
back into the world, tethered me
to wonder, to mystery; connected me
to all I cannot understand.
Even now, there are drops falling
down my face. Perhaps, if the light
were just right, one might see
inside them something beautiful.
After the Loss
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged grief, letter, loss, missing, unreliable narrator on March 1, 2023| 14 Comments »
I don’t think of all the lines from letters
I will never learn by heart,
those letters that you never wrote
about those days you didn’t live—
those mornings you didn’t wake to snow,
those friends you didn’t bring back home,
those tangy foods served in countries
where you will never go.
Is it strange to miss what never was?
I wouldn’t know.
I’m not thinking of them now,
all those letters that you never wrote.
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
To Those Who Are Comforting a Woman Who Lost a Child Today
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged advice, child, friendship, grief, loss, mother on February 18, 2023| 17 Comments »
There is nothing you can fix.
The only thing to do is love her.
Tomorrow, next week,
there might be laundry.
Or mail. Or a meal.
Or a phone call
when she will need for you
to be near her
when she tells the other person
her child is dead.
Hold her hand, or,
if she needs space,
don’t hold it.
Say her name.
Say the name of her child.
Walk with her, or sit still.
Pray for her when you’re not with her,
even if she doesn’t pray,
even if you don’t know how,
even if the words
feel like foreign objects in your mouth.
Light a candle.
Give her your heart.
it’s the only thing that matters,
though it will not ease her
nor help her sleep
nor solve a damn thing.
Though there is no hope
you can make things right.
Though she may push you away.
Though anything you do
will be woefully insufficient, love her.
With your whole being, love her.
It will not be enough.
It is the only thing.
Tell her, if you can, you love her.
But if you can’t,
just love her.
Just love her.
Hymn
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged grief, loss, mother, river, song on January 26, 2023| 12 Comments »
The shocking tender curl of him,
wild river, raging, rush of him,
the eddied, lazy swirl of Sunday
morning sleepy smile of him,
the flood-stage leaping wave of him,
high overflowing shores of him,
torrential reckless course of him,
now empty, unfilled banks of—
dry barren rocky bed of—
the utter lack of here of—
the pray-for-rain parched air of him,
dark growing rain cloud storm of him,
the sometimes-I-hear-rapids hum,
deep currents in my lungs of him
how is it I still breathe him in—
the river is inside me hymn.
Down the Rabbit Hole
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged gentleness, loss, rabbit, zodiac on January 23, 2023| 12 Comments »
It’s the Year of the Rabbit,
and I can’t help but think
of the photo of my son
the week before he died
holding a white rabbit in Ecuador—
a rabbit he bought and loved for an hour.
“Mom,” he said through the phone,
“can I bring home a rabbit? Please?”
I told him it wouldn’t make it through customs,
but he could buy one here at home.
It’s the Year of the Rabbit,
and it feels right the crawl spaces
beneath our porches now shelter
the sweetest brown bunnies.
Where did they come from?
Every day now, my husband feeds them
pellets and lettuce. Every day
I watch for their tracks in the snow,
thrill when I see the sweet lumps
of their bodies as they venture into the day.
It’s the year of the Rabbit,
a time, they say, for calm
and patient energy.
I don’t know if I believe in the zodiac,
but I believe in gentleness.
I believe in thinking things through.
I believe in peace.
It’s the Year of the Rabbit,
and I am in love with rabbits—
with their large ears and feet
and their quivering noses
and the way they have hopped their way
into my life bringing softness
where there has been pain,
bringing calm where there has been trauma.
I will go down that rabbit hole.
I will make in that burrow a home.
One Everywhere
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged christmas tree, loss, memory on January 17, 2023| 6 Comments »
like Christmas tree needles
still appearing long after the tree is gone—
these memories of you