Tag: grief
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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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The Writing Blues
My children are ever so much more productively writing than I am. Vincent’s discovering the discoveries and challenges of reading and writing, and Aidan is doggedly working on his own mysterious pages. I, on the other hand, have written exactly two poems since my mother died. That Salamander will be publishing one of them in…
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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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“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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“Remembrance–mighty word.”*
I’ve had an interesting enough life, I think. But I’ve never had that impulse before, the almost visceral drive to document my life in prose. The memoir. You could argue that’s what I do here, but I think of this as a selection of very loose-jointed, random snapshots. I get it now. Though it’s not…
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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…