Category Archives: poetry

Layers, writing, grief

After Danny died, two friends gave me the book: The Unfolding by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer. She is an accomplished poet who lives in Colorado who lost her son, Finn, to suicide in 2021. She credits her daily poetry-writing practice with helping her survive the loss. It’s no surprise that her words speak to me. As does the idea of writing through grief.

Here’s something I wrote yesterday after listening to a podcast interview.*

I used to think

I used to think

peeling away layers improved the self — releasing defenses, say, allowing greater authenticity. Now

the removal of any layer of any kind leads to more grief — grief that was pooling, swelling, hiding, and waiting, apparently, for me to trip and fall into it.

I don’t know whether to wish for armor — shiny, hard, and impenetrable — or for a sudden and violent removal of all layers, as if ripping off a bandaid. Under the bandaid I would find a tiny wound and the exposure to air would help it form a scab. Heal.

Hush. Don’t say anything. I already know. Shiny garb left the wardrobe the day he died. And now tiny wounds are beneath notice given the chasm caused by grief.

I can only twist and turn in sorrow’s ambush, holding my hands over my heart, (mostly) hoping to survive.

* The Calming Ground Podcast, Writing through Grief: Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer on Poetry, Loss, and the Wonderment of Being Alive

So what did she say?

My mother. What did she say to me last week at the cemetery, you might have wondered.

My first questions was, “I couldn’t save my boy. What kind of mother does that make me?” Mom was characteristically blunt. “You were blinded by hope.”

It’s something that hadn’t quite occurred to me and I found it a little freeing. It twists blame with the light of positive mothering. How we always hope for what is best for our children can never be counted as a fault or a weakness.

While I knew Danny was suicidal in those sixteen days of March, I clung to his life-affirming acts as proof of something.

Fishing, working out at the gym, corresponding with potential roommates in Boulder.

Though panic laced the days and an overwhelming sense of powerlessness colored everything back then, we hoped.

A few days after hearing my mother’s opinion, synchronicity afforded confirmation with a pithy post on Instagram.

My second question to my mother concerned the future. I asked her how I’m supposed to go on. “Dare to live,” she said. “Dare to live large. Dare to not give a fuck.”

She lived large. Me? The hemming and hawing middle child? Less so.

I guess I can let loose with my surviving son and send him funny memes when I know he’d probably prefer I didn’t (I’m not really kidding here).

This morning on a podcast, I heard the Irish poet David Whyte utter these words:

“The world was made to be free in… Anyone or anything that does not bring you alive, is too small for you.”

Earlier in the interview, he quoted an Irish saying: “The thing about the past is that it’s not past.”

Danny sleeping, a peony, and Browning quote

All of this by way of saying, I’m wondering in what ways my past might afford some answers. By the past I don’t mean my childhood in the suburbs of Schenectady or Pittsfield, but the past in the hills of my ancestors in Ireland.

What do some of my old books have to say about grief, about love, about living large?

If you gave yourself permission to live large, what would you do differently?

Danny’s record of catch and release from last year

Krista Tippet interview with David Whyte here.

I feed the birds

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I feed the birds
I walk in the rain
I Windex the glass
I forget my toast in the toaster
I get dressed
I wear a necklace with navy blue beads
I wonder where you are
I look at the scattering of dogwood blossoms on the ground and think of you,
dead
We walk through the playground where you went to elementary school

You were alive
My umbrella is red
My necklace is blue
My heart is broken
Cliches cluster inside my aching throat
Those dogwood flowers shone pearly white, edges tinged with pink not long ago. Not long ago you were staring at a screen, face lit up — gaming? Or maybe researching where to buy ammunition for a 9mm gun
The dogwood blossoms rot. You are ashes

Muscle, bone, skin incinerated

I cook my strawberries
I buy local lettuce
You are gone. Gone
It’s almost time for lunch
Lentils and rice
Rice already cooked, lentils in a bag.
You are well and truly gone
Not every meal has to be from scratch.

In making you, our bodies traded genetic material. Some of me was in you and some of you is still in me. How do I think about this?

We pile up stuff
We fill the trunk
We drop boxes off
The weight of our belongings. So little of it holds meaning now, if it ever did.
I need a mug, my pillows, baskets of fabric, pins and thread, fans, a mirror or two, a few favorite paintings, my electric toothbrush. Some notebooks.
How little really!

What you needed was out of reach, beyond you, or so you thought. A life rendered impossible by a failure of imagination is one way to look at it.

I wish you could have stayed. I wish you were here. I wish you could have stayed.

Feathers? A picture falling off a shelf. That one dream. It’s not enough.

I know you’re at peace. At rest. That’s something. That gives me peace too.

My thumb hurts. My eyes are tired. Another day comes to an end.

Yesterday’s collage: Fall will arrive without you

PS Readers — forgive the repetitive nature of how I am processing the loss of Danny. I give myself permission to bore you, to repeat myself, to hammer the same words home over and over as I try to make sense of what makes no sense.