Category: death
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Grief & Poetry in Progress
Seventeen weeks since my mother died. If my grief were a baby, it wouldn’t be eating solid food yet. If my grief were a grapevine, the fruit would only now be ripening. But my grief will not grow, or rot on the vine. If anything has changed, it’s my understanding of how to approach it:…
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Magical Thinking
If I’m mired in grief, it’s not for Mum’s death alone. Since March there have been so many losses: four mothers dead, and only one of them mine, and another just 42, just last week. This will surprise no one, but it’s not my grief that’s the most difficult, but the anguish of these bereft…
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“Every lament is a love-song.”*
Many summer Sundays growing up, my family would get up at dawn, skip church, and instead head out to the beach at the Myles Standish State Forest in Carver, MA. Not just my immediate family, but a huge swath of aunts, uncles, and cousins — Mum was a Georgia girl, but Dad was born &…
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The Emperor of All Maladies hastens The Long Goodbye
But first: The Massachusetts Poetry Festival begins tomorrow! The poetry world will descend on Salem and it will be awesome. (Aside: I was researching parking etc on Google, and, as I began to note the many paranormal/witchy shops, wondered, What’s up with that? Yeah, that’s me, just a little slow on the uptake.) Saturday is…
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A Preponderance of Grief.
Not only did I get the two reviews I’d committed to writing written (one on Carol Frost, the other on Ellen Bryant Voigt), but I got them done early, a minor miracle. So they were published early. Reading them in printed form, I discovered something I hadn’t noticed in the absorption of writing — both…
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Super-Power Delusions.
I’m a Buffy fan, and once in a while, not often, but once in a while I have these dreams — don’t we all have these unspoken assumptions, when watching shows like Buffy or Heroes that we would be one of the strong ones, whatever the struggle, we’d triumph & survive. So sometimes I have…
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Friday Miscellany.
The Marine Honor Guard attended Uncle Joe’s funeral — “Taps” is the most devastating music — you respond viscerally, instantly. Even as we mourned, though, I was glad that they came, that they honored him, that he was remembered. Funerals, memorial services — they’re important. That kind of communal grief is comforting, the communal recognition…
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Weekend of Mourning.
Uncle Joe died last night. He was close to 90 and looked it, a WW II vet who had quite a time watching Flags of Our Fathers with my brothers and cousins when they took him to the movie, and the kind and loving family patriarch, the eldest brother as my dad was the youngest,…
Marie Gauthier 