Category: family
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Celebrating good news!
When I was 21 and my father died, I stopped writing for 3 years. The DSM-5TR probably has a thing or two to say about how I handled my grief back then, but my writing block is all that’s relevant now. Because 19 years later, when my mother died, I fairly bled poems. If you…
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What’s your story?
“What’s your story? It’s all in the telling. Stories are compasses and architecture; we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice. To…
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A few of my favorite things
It’s getting to be ludicrous how lax I’ve been as a blogger, so I won’t even bother apologizing but will just skip right on by. Because the year is late and time is short but there’s always much to be thankful for: Journals whose new issues include my poems, to my everlasting gratitude and delight:…
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Autumn nipping at my heels
How on earth did it get to be October already? Georgia is five months old, Vincent’s in first grade, and middle child Aidan is universally praised as sweet and gentle and photogenic as hell: The lateness of the year terrifies me — intimations of mortality etc. — but I love autumn. Kicking leaves on the…
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Taste of Summer
There are some books, some poets, that I instinctively associate with winter — Leslie Harrison’s Displacement, Frost, all the Russians (accurate or not) — but who do you think of as a summer poet? Lyrical, fulsome, hot… give me some recommendations. I’m in a mood. Life is bursting at the seams here. In addition to…
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Winter Ghosts
I’ve been negligent. As I become more obviously pregnant, folks are so obviously and loquaciously delighted, and yes, this new baby, this unexpected girl, is a much-needed bright star in a dark year. How lovely to talk about impending birth instead of death! But it’s exhausting being so grateful all the time. I find myself…
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Auld Lang Syne
I don’t want to let the year end without saying that, for all of 2011’s sorrows, I am deeply and heartfelt-fully grateful for my family — my boys, my husband, sisters, brothers, cousins, aunts, etc. — and all my loyal and loving friends — virtual and otherwise. You remind me of what’s true and dear…
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And the days go by
Non-writing activities have kept me busy this summer — work, Collected Poets planning for 2012, reading, afternoons at the state forest beach with the boys (that season pass was the best $35 I’ve ever spent!) — July slipped by like a field of fireflies winking out. Despite the surfeit of grief, it’s been nice. Come…
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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…
Marie Gauthier 