Dearly. How was it used? Dearly beloved. Dearly beloved, we are gathered. Dearly beloved, we are gathered here in this forgotten photo album I came upon recently.
Dearly beloved, gathered here together in this closed drawer, fading now, I miss you. I miss the missing, those who left earlier. I miss even those who are still here. I miss you all dearly. Dearly do I sorrow for you.
Sorrow: that’s another word you don’t hear much anymore. I sorrow dearly. ~Margaret Atwood from “Dearly”
All day we packed boxes. We read birth and death certificates. The yellowed telegrams that announced our births, the cards of congratulations and condolences, the deeds and debts, love letters, valentines with a heart ripped out, the obituaries. We opened the divorce decree, a terrible document of division and subtraction. We leafed through scrapbooks: corsages, matchbooks, programs to the ballet, racetrack, theater—joy and frivolity parceled in one volume— painstakingly arranged, preserved and pasted with crusted glue. We sat in the room in which the beloved had departed. We remembered her yellow hair and her mind free of paradox. We sat together side by side on the empty floor and did not speak. There were no words between us other than the essence of the words from the correspondences, our inheritance—plain speak, bereft of poetry. ~Jill Bialosky “The Guardians” from The Players.
This time of year, huge flocks of migrating birds pass noisily overhead, striving together in their united effort to reach home. I envy their shared instinct to gather together with purpose.
Human families can be far more scattered and far less harmonious, yet still plenty noisy.
Through these holiday weeks, I take time to remember those who left this life long ago. It is bittersweet to be all together only in a photo album, with youth and smiles preserved indefinitely.
In a flash of time, three generations have passed: children have had children who now have children. Newlyweds have become grandparents, trying valiantly to fit the shoes of those who came before.
In our own eventual leave-taking, we will become the missing to be missed. There will come along new generations – those we will never meet – who will turn the pages of photograph albums and writings and wonder aloud about these unknown people from whom they descend.
Dearly beloved, we who are missing are right here, waiting in a drawer or a file or a book on the shelf, ready to share, in plain words bereft of poetry, all our love and hopes and sorrows for you, the future generations to come.
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At times, particularly at night, I’m keenly aware of all the unknowable and uncountable lives happening behind closed doors and curtained windows, each one living their own sacred moment in time.
So many meals being eaten, baths taken, tears shed, stories told, prayers recited, kisses shared.
These moments are the blessings of a quotidian predictability that we try to pass on to our children. In our routines, we may become oblivious to the mysteries happening all around us: innumerable stars shining, fragile moths fluttering and sweetening apples hanging heavy — yet there is mystery within each of us as well.
In the dark of night, despite our weariness: We are remarkably loved and loving. We try our best in difficult times and circumstances. We grieve losses while struggling to survive sorrows. We seek purpose and meaning, despite feeling unworthy.
Each passing moment becomes one to cherish. Each moment mysteriously holy and sweet.
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A life should leave deep tracks: ruts where she went out and back to get the mail or move the hose around the yard; where she used to stand before the sink, a worn-out place; beneath her hand the china knobs rubbed down to white pastilles; the switch she used to feel for in the dark almost erased. Her things should keep her marks. The passage of a life should show; it should abrade. And when life stops, a certain space— however small— should be left scarred by the grand and damaging parade. Things shouldn’t be so hard. ~Kay Ryan “Things Shouldn’t Be So Hard” from The Niagra River
“The passage of a life should show…”
Since losing my friend Sara unexpectedly a month ago, I’ve thought a lot about the deep tracks she left behind. Traces of her life will forever mark her husband and children and grandchildren. They follow her pathways in her large farmhouse kitchen from sink to stove to cupboard to table. Her garden and orchard display her obvious affection for things that bloom and fruit while her wrap-around porch mirrors her love of sitting and witnessing it all.
Most of all her tracks are showing up on so many broken hearts, where we still feel her presence. Although I realize she is truly gone from this world, it is as if the season suddenly changed in response to her leaving. The misty mornings seem weary, the trees are now bare, the frost has been thick and a north wind has started to blow. Before too long, we’ll be remembering her boot steps in the barnyard snow.
No one Sara touched has been left abraded or scarred from her use. She was far too gentle in her touch; she worked hard not to leave traces of where she had been, as determined as she was to avoid attention. Her intention was to always remain in the background so others could shine. Now that she is gone, the background itself has been changed. The passage of her life will not dim the light she focused on her family and friends and the patients who loved her.
She wouldn’t want it to be this hard without her here. But it is.
Like in old cans of paint the last green hue, these leaves are sere and rough and dull-complected behind the blossom clusters in which blue is not so much displayed as it’s reflected;
They do reflect it imprecise and teary, as though they’d rather have it go away, and just like faded, once blue stationery, they’re tinged with yellow, violet and gray;
As in an often laundered children’s smock, cast off, its usefulness now all but over, one senses running down a small life’s clock.
Yet suddenly the blue revives, it seems, and in among these clusters one discovers a tender blue rejoicing in the green. ~Rainer Maria Rilke “Blue Hydrangea” Translation by Bernhard Frank
… I’m tethered, and devoted to your raw and lonely bloom
my lavish need to drink your world of crowded cups to fill. ~Tara Bray “hydrangea” from Image Journal
Dwelling within a mosaic of dying colors, these petals fold and collapse under the weight of the sky’s tears.
This hydrangea bears a rainbow of hues, once-vibrant promises of blue now fading to rusts and grays.
I know what this is like: the running out of the clock, feeling the limits of vitality.
Withering and drying, I’m drawn, thirsty for the beauty, to this waning artist’s palette.
To quench my thirst: from an open cup, an invitation, an everlasting visual sacrament.
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Outside the house the wind is howling and the trees are creaking horribly. This is an old story with its old beginning, as I lay me down to sleep. But when I wake up, sunlight has taken over the room. You have already made the coffee and the radio brings us music from a confident age. In the paper bad news is set in distant places. Whatever was bound to happen in my story did not happen. But I know there are rules that cannot be broken. Perhaps a name was changed. A small mistake. Perhaps a woman I do not know is facing the day with the heavy heart that, by all rights, should have been mine. ~Lisel Mueller “In November” from Alive Together
It does not escape me~ (I awake every day knowing this) a disastrous earthquake happened somewhere else, a war ravages families on both sides of a border, a windstorm leveled a town, a drunk driver devastated two families, a fire left a house in ashes, a mother nearly died giving birth, a flood ravaged a village, a grim diagnosis darkened someone’s remaining days.
No mistake has been made, yet I awake knowing this part of my story has yet to visit me – I hear of so much suffering, knowing the heavy heart that could have been mine still beats, still breaks, still aches, still believes in grace, mercy, and miracles.
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There is a gold light in certain old paintings That represents a diffusion of sunlight. It is like happiness, when we are happy. It comes from everywhere and from nowhere at once, this light… One day the sickness shall pass from the earth for good. The orchard will bloom; Our work will be seen as strong and clean and good And all that we suffered through having existed Shall be forgotten as though it had never existed. ~Donald Justice – excerpt from Collected Poems
I live where golden hour light is doled out sparingly – we just might get too used to it – where gray clouds tend to mute and muffle the spirit.
So I search for light as if it is buried like treasure.
When gilded light illuminates and glows, when all is immersed and lifted by its radiance, I forget the gray, as if it never was.
So I wait patiently, ready for another such burst of joy coming from everywhere and nowhere all at once. A moment in time to be preserved, not to be forgotten.
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You are not surprised at the force of the storm— you have seen it growing. The trees flee. Now you must go out into your heart as onto a vast plain. Now the immense loneliness begins.
The days go numb, the wind sucks the world from your senses like withered leaves.
Through the empty branches the sky remains. It is what you have. Be earth now, and evensong. Be the ground lying under that sky. Be modest now, like a thing ripened until it is real, so that he who began it all can feel you when he reaches for you. ~Rainer Maria Rilke from “Onto a Vast Plain”
I feel autumn rain Trying to explain something I do not want to know. ~Richard Wright “Haiku”
I know what this heavy autumn rainfall is trying to tell me –
Be buffed smooth by the winds, and lose your sharp edges Be restored after too many hot weeks of drought and dust Be humbled walking through mud and slosh and slick soppiness Be grateful for this newly opened landscape as trees shed leaves Be aware that sadness has its place this time of year, seeking solace Be balm to ones who are lonely and hunger for encouragement Be ready to remain still, listen, and content with what comes each day.
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When great souls die, the air around us becomes light, rare, sterile. We breathe, briefly. Our eyes, briefly, see with a hurtful clarity. Our memory, suddenly sharpened, examines, gnaws on kind words unsaid, promised walks never taken.
Great souls die and our reality, bound to them, takes leave of us. Our souls, dependent upon their nurture,now shrink, wizened. Our minds, formed and informed by their radiance, fall away. We are not so much maddened as reduced to the unutterable ignorance of dark, cold caves.
And when great souls die, after a period peace blooms, slowly and always irregularly. Spaces fill with a kind of soothing electric vibration. Our senses, restored, never to be the same, whisper to us. They existed. They existed. We can be. Be and be better. For they existed. ~Maya Angelou from “When Great Trees Fall”
Sara, my dear friend of nearly forty years,
When I learned you died this morning, your body overwhelmed by a sudden illness no one anticipated – I sat in stillness, trying once again to remember your soft voice, as if you were still part of this world.
I knew you were gone.
It was God’s timing to collect you back and so you went. We all are poorer without you – you the richer as you settle into a body no longer a burden and a struggle.
As recently as last week, you wondered aloud if you had it in you, after decades of surviving chronic illness and two cancers, to keep going with all your physical challenges. God heard your prayer. Instead of feeling depleted and emptied of purpose, you are now restored. The love and energy you shared during your long life, through your doctoring and farming and mothering and grandmothering, is replenished in the presence of Jesus Christ.
You have left so much of yourself behind: Your mentoring made me a better doctor. Your example made me a better mother. Your gentle compassion made me a better friend. Your forgiving grace and quiet patience made me a better person.
I wasn’t yet ready to say goodbye to you: I regret not saying everything I needed to say. I regret not taking more walks with you. I regret not letting you know how much you blessed me and the world simply by existing.
Now there is no doubt you are blessing heaven. And so we who love you – your husband, children, grandchildren, your friends, colleagues, former patients – gratefully share the rare gift of grace that is Dr. Sara Cuene Watson.
All flesh is grass, and all its beauty is like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades when the breath of the LORD blows on it; surely the people are grass. The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever. Isaiah 40: 6-8
A poem waits for the mystery in you— girl at the window apple blossoms, orchard the horses you don’t own Hope at the way station the sail you have not found the dance you have, as yet, only done in dreams.
Pour in what calls, “Let me out.” The gift. The limb. The sun. The moon.
A poem waits for the mystery in you— Pour in, pour in. Nothing can break the delicate glass of its holding. ~L.L. Barkat “Delicate”
Vermeer–Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window
I’ll tell you a secret: poems hide. In the bottoms of our shoes, they are sleeping. They are the shadows drifting across our ceilings the moment before we wake up. What we have to do is live in a way that lets us find them. — Naomi Shihab Nye
Poems were hidden from me for decades. I was oblivious a hundred times a day to their secrets: dripping right over me in the shower, rising over hills bright pink, tucked under a toadstool, breathing deeply as I auscultated a chest, unfolding with each blossom, settling heavily on my eyelids at night.
The day I awoke to them was the day over twenty years ago when thousands of innocents died in sudden cataclysm of airplanes and buildings and fire — people not knowing when they got up that day it would be their last. And such taking of life happens again and again; our world continues to weep.
Now poems don’t hide themselves as often. I begin to see, listen, touch, smell, taste as if each day would be my last. I am learning to live in a way that helps me discern the mystery and it overwhelms me.
Poems are everywhere when I look.
And I don’t know if I have enough time left to write them all down
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In a hundred trillion years— an actual number though we can’t begin to grasp it—the last traces of our universe will be not even a memory with no memory to lament it.
The last dust of the last star will not drift in the great nothing out of which everything we love or imagine eventually comes.
Yet every day, every four hours around the clock, Debbie prepares her goat’s-milk mix for the orphaned filly who sucks down all three liters of it, gratefully, it seems, as if it matters more than anything in the universe— and it does—at this moment while the sun is still four hours from rising on the only day that matters.
Over eight years ago, our Haflinger mare Marlee passed on to her forever home, far sooner than we planned. She was only twenty two, born only two months after our daughter’s birth, much too young an age for a Haflinger to die.
But something dire was happening to her over the previous two weeks — not eating much, an expanding girth, then shortness of breath. It was confirmed she had untreatable lymphoma.
Her bright eyes were shining to the end so it was very hard to ask the vet to turn the light off. But the time had clearly come.
Marlee M&B came to us as a six month old “runty orphan” baby by the lovely stallion Sterling Silver, but she was suddenly weaned at three days when her mama Melissa died of sepsis. She never really weaned from her around the clock bottle/bucket feeding humans Stefan and Andrea Bundshuh at M&B Farm in Canada. From them she knew people’s behavior, learned their nonverbal language, and understood human subtleties that most horses never learn. This made her quite a challenge as a youngster as it also meant there was no natural reserve nor natural respect for people. She had no boundaries taught by a mother, so we tried to teach her the proper social cues.
When turned out with the herd as a youngster, she was completely clueless–she’d approach the dominant alpha mare incorrectly, without proper submission, get herself bitten and kicked and was the bottom of the social heap for years, a lonesome little filly with few friends and very few social skills. She had never learned submission with people either, and had to have many remedial lessons on her training path. Once she was a mature working mare, her relationship with people markedly improved as there was structure to her work and predictability for her, and after having her own foals, she picked up cues and signals that helped her keep her foal safe, though she was one of our most relaxed “do whatever you need to do” mothers when we handled her foals as she simply never learned that she needed to be concerned.
Over the years, as the herd changed, Marlee became the alpha mare, largely by default and seniority, so I don’t believe she really trusted her position as “real”. She tended to bully, and react too quickly out of her own insecurity about her inherited position. She was very skilled with her ears but she was also a master at the tail “whip” and the tensed upper lip–no teeth, just a slight wrinkling of the lip. The herd scattered when they saw her face change. The irony of it all is that when she was “on top” of the herd hierarchy, she was more lonely than when she was at the bottom. And I think a whole lot less happy as she had few grooming partners any more.
She accompanied us to the fair for a week of display of our Haflingers year after year after year — she could be always counted on to greet the public and enjoy days of braiding and petting and kids sitting on her back.
The day she started formal under saddle training was when the light bulb went off in her head–this was a job she could do! This was constant communication and interaction with a human being, which she craved! This was what she was meant for! And she thrived under saddle, advancing quickly in her skills, almost too fast, as she wanted so much to please her trainer.
For a time, she had an unequaled record among North American Haflingers. She was not only regional champion in her beginner novice division of eventing as a pregnant 5 year old, but also received USDF Horse of the Year awards in First and Second Level dressage that year as the highest scoring Haflinger.
She had a career of mothering along with intermittent riding work, with 5 foals –Winterstraum, Marquisse, Myst, Wintermond, and Nordstrom—each from different stallions, and each very different from one another.
This mare had such a remarkable work ethic, was “fine-tuned” so perfectly with a sensitivity to cues–that our daughter said: “Mom, it’s going to make me such a better rider because I know she pays attention to everything I do with my body–whether my heels are down, whether I’m sitting up straight or not.” Marlee was, to put it simply, trained to train her riders.
I miss her high pitched whinny from the barn whenever she heard the back door to the house open. I miss her pushy head butt on the stall door when it was time to close it up for the night. I miss that beautiful unforgettable face and those large deep brown eyes where the light was always on. Keeping that orphan alive when she was so vulnerable in the first two months was all that mattered.
What a ride she had for twenty two years, that dear little orphan. What a ride she gave to many who trained her and who she trained over the years. Though I never climbed on her back, what joy she gave me all those years, as the surrogate mom who loved and fed her. May I meet her in my memories, whenever I feel lonesome for her, still unable to resist those bright eyes forever now closed in peace.
Marlee’s photo album:
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