Tag: grief

The Healing Crack in the Coil

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Needing them still, I come
when I can, this time to the sea
where we share a room: their double bed,
my single. Morning fog paints the pale
scene even paler. Lace curtains breathing,
the chenille spread folded back,
my father’s feet white sails furled
at the edge of blue pajamas.
Every child’s dream, a parent
in each hand, though this child is fifty.
Their bodies fit easily, with room
to spare. When did they grow
so small? Grow so small—
as if it were possible to swell
backwards into an earlier self.

One more year, I ask the silence.
Last night to launch myself
into sleep I counted their breaths, the tidal
rise and fall I now put my ear to,
the coiled shell of their lives.
~Rebecca McClanahan from “Watching my Parents Sleeping Beside an Open Window Near the Sea” from Deep Light: New and Selected Poems.

“Her Room” by Andrew Wyeth in the Farnsworth Art Museum

My parents have been gone now for some time, my father 30 years, my mother, nearly 17 years. Their dying was a long process of counted breaths and pauses. I witnessed their bodies curling into themselves, shrinking smaller, worn down by illness and age.

I still miss them as I’m reminded of them by the events of my own life, still wanting them to take me by the hand as I navigate my own daily path.

After mom’s death, those possessions not distributed to family members have remained packed up and stored in our barn buildings. I know it is well past time to deal with their stuff as I become keenly aware of my own graying and aging.

In the house, next to where I write, is a box of over 500 letters written by my mother and father between 1941 and 1945. The letters began as they were getting to know each other at college, going from “pinned” to “engaged” and continue for three and a half more years after a hurried wedding Christmas Eve 1942. By mid-January 1943, my newly minted Marine officer father shipped out to spend the next three years of his life fighting on the battlefields of Saipan, Tinian and Tarawa in the Pacific Ocean, not to return again to the states until late summer of 1945.

My mother wrote her letters from the small rural eastern Washington community of Colville, living in a “teachers’ cottage” with other war wives who taught school while waiting for their husbands to return home – or not.

It took me a decade to find the courage and time to devote to reading these letters they treasured and never threw away. I sorted them unopened by postmark date into some semblance of order and sat down to start at the very beginning, which, of course, is my beginning as well. I opened each one with some trepidation and a lump in my throat about what I might find written there. I worried I may find things I didn’t want to know. I hoped I would find things that I desperately needed to know.

Most of all I wanted to understand the two people who became my parents within the coiled shell of their forty years together, though broken by a painful divorce which lasted a decade. Having lived through that awful time with them, I want to understand the origin of a love which eventually mended their cracked shell of companionship, gluing them back together for five more years before my father died.

As I ponder their words, I too cross a bridge back to them both, my ear pressed to the coiled shell of those fading voices, as if I might still hear the sea, at times bringing them closer, then pulling them farther away.

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For the Children…

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If anyone, then, knows the good they ought to do and doesn’t do it,
it is a sin.
James 4:17

The rising hills, the slopes,
of statistics
lie before us,
the steep climb
of everything, going up,
up, as we all
go down.

In the next century
or the one beyond that,
they say,
are valleys, pastures,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it.

To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children:

stay together
learn the flowers
go light
~Gary Snyder “For the Children” from Turtle Island.

After another school/church massacre;
how can there be nothing new to say?

We’ve learned nothing about keeping weapons
out of the hands of people bent on destruction –
taking themselves out after taking others with them.

To our children and grandchildren:
as a society, we have failed to keep you out of harm’s way
by failing to control the harm of modern weapons
in the wrong hands.

How can we be forgiven over and over
as shootings happen again and again.
Maybe we didn’t pull the trigger,
but we allowed someone else to.

Together, we share the responsibility
for each and every death that has happened,
and more bound to happen on our watch.

And that is a heavy burden to bear.

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Where We Could Not Reach

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My father would lift me
to the ceiling in his big hands
and ask, How’s the weather up there?
And it was good, the weather
of being in his hands, his breath
of scotch and cigarettes, his face
smiling from the world below.
O daddy, was the lullaby I sang
back down to him as he stood on earth,
my great, white-shirted father, home
from work, his gold wristwatch
and wedding band gleaming
as he held me above him
for as long as he could,
before his strength failed
down there in the world I find myself
standing in tonight, my little boy
looking down from his flight
below the ceiling, cradled in my hands,
his eyes wide and already staring
into the distance beyond the man
asking him again and again,
How’s the weather up there?
~George Bilgere “Weather”.

It was hard work, dying, harder
than anything he’d ever done.

Whatever brutal, bruising, back-
breaking chore he’d forced himself

to endure—it was nothing
compared to this. And it took

so long. When would the job
be over? Who would call him

home for supper? And it was
hard for us (his children)—

all of our lives we’d heard
my mother telling us to go out,

help your father, but this
was work we could not do.

He was way out beyond us,
in a field we could not reach.
~Joyce Sutphen “My Father, Dying”

Deep in one of our closets is an old film reel of me about 16 months old sitting securely held by my father on his shoulders. I am bursting out with giggles as he repeatedly bends forward, dipping his head and shoulders down. I tip forward, looking like I am about to fall off, and when he stands back up straight, my mouth becomes a large O and I can almost remember the tummy tickle I feel. I want him to do it again and again, taking me to the edge of falling off and then bringing me back from the brink.

My father was a tall man, so being swept up onto his shoulders felt a bit like I was touching heaven.

It was as he lay dying 30 years ago this summer that I realized again how tall he was — his feet kept hitting the foot panel of the hospital bed my mother had requested for their home. We cushioned his feet with padding so he wouldn’t get abrasions even though he would never stand on them again, no longer towering over us.

His helplessness in dying was startling – this man who could build anything and accomplish whatever he set his mind to was unable to subdue his cancer. Our father, who was so self-sufficient he rarely asked for help, did not know how to ask for help now.

So we did what we could when we could tell he was uncomfortable, which wasn’t often. He didn’t say much, even though there was much we could have been saying. We didn’t reminisce. We didn’t laugh and joke together. We just were there, taking shifts catching naps on the couch so we could be available if he called out, which he never did.

This man:
who had grown up dirt poor,
fought hard with his alcoholic father
left abruptly to go to college – the first in his family –
then called to war for three years in the South Pacific.

This man:
who had raised a family on a small farm while he was a teacher,
then a supervisor, then a desk worker.

This man:
who left our family to marry another woman
but returned after a decade to ask forgiveness.

This man:
who died in a house he had built completely himself,
without assistance, from the ground up.

He didn’t need our help – he who had held tightly to us and brought us back from the brink when we went too far – he had been on the brink himself and was rescued, coming back humbled.

No question the weather is fine for him up there. I have no doubt.

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Holding a Memory of Cherries

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We used to pick cherries over the hill
where we paid to climb wooden ladders
into the bright haven above our heads, the fruit
dangling earthward. Dark, twinned bells
ringing in some good fortune just beyond
our sight. I have lived on earth long enough
to know good luck arrives only on its way
to someone else, for it must leave you to the miracle
of your own misfortune, lest you grow weary
of harvest, of cherries falling from the crown of sky
in mid-summer, of hours of idle. Let there be
a stone of suffering. Let the fruit taste of sweetness
and dust. Let grief split your heart so precisely
you must hold, somehow, a memory of cherries—
tart talismans of pleasure—in the rucksack
of your soul. Taut skin, sharp blessing.

Luminous, ordinary and acute.
~Danusha Laméris “U-Pick Orchards”

Life is not a bowl of cherries,
unless you count the ones
that aren’t yet ripe, or are over-ripe,
or have a squirrel- or bird-bite taken,
or have shriveled to raisins on the tree.

Yes, there are perfect cherries
that shine in the dark, glistening with promise,
tempting us to climb high to pick them.

Those we really want usually are out of reach.

How can we know what perfection is
unless we experience where life falls short?

The lingering taste of grief,
the agony of waiting for word in a tragedy,
the gnawing emptiness of indescribable loss.

Only the memory of what was nearly perfect,
remembering what could have been
knowing what will someday be our reality
can ease the bitter pit of suffering now.

May the families of those swept away in flooding,
those who live in the path of war and violence,
those who hunger for justice, or starving for food,
those who struggle with life-threatening and chronic illness
somehow know the comfort of God’s perfection awaits them.
The Light and Goodness is there for us to taste,
yet just beyond our reach.

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Afraid Our Words Will Not Be Heard

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…And when the sun rises we are afraid
it might not remain
when the sun sets we are afraid
it might not rise in the morning
when our stomachs are full we are afraid
of indigestion
when our stomachs are empty we are afraid
we may never eat again
when we are loved we are afraid
love will vanish
when we are alone we are afraid
love will never return
and when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid

So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive.
~Audre Lorde from “A Litany for Survival”

We are all here so briefly, just trying to survive.

Although designed to live forever,
we are fallen,
running the clock out as long as we can.

Just one day more, we say. Give us just one more.

From the first, there has been struggle –
the pain of our birth, the cry of our laboring mother,
then feeding and protection of our children,
keeping them safe from the bombs of war
and the ravages of disease,
followed by weakening of our frail aging bodies.

If there is a reason for all this (and there is):
life’s struggles redeem us.

Heaven knows,
each life means something to God,
each death echoes His sorrow.

We fear we fail to make a difference
in such a short time.
So we speak.
Hear our voices.
Just one day more, Lord.
Please – one day more.

Tomorrow we’ll discover
What our God in Heaven has in store
One more dawn
One more day
One day more…
~from Les Miserable

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Wondering Where Life Has Gone

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For to come upon warblers in early May was to forget time and death.—Theodore Roethke

Every poem of death        
should start
with my mother’s love        
for birds.
Finches and waxwings        
her favorites,
though she wasn’t        
one to quibble;
an eagle dragging a carp        
across the sky
would do.

There are worse things        
than being dead.
You might be swallowed   
by the daily minutia
of the great mundane,        
to be spit up
years later        
wondering where
your life has gone.

But loving something        
can save you:
the way finches        
stack a feeder,
meddle in each other’s        
business until
a woodpecker crashes in,       
littering surrounding
shrubs with wings.

Last summer my wife        
found a hummingbird
on Mount Pisgah.        
Its emerald wings trembled
as its feet tried to grasp        
her fingers.
A ranger said        
that their lives
are so short anyway.        
What a curious reply,
I thought, but later        
reconsidered.
Perhaps any time       
 being a hummingbird
is enough.
~Bill Brown “With the Help of Birds”

photo by Josh Scholten
photo by Josh Scholten

That long-ago morning at Ruth’s farm
when I hid in the wisteria
and watched hummingbirds. I thought
the ruby or gold that gleamed on their throats
was the honeyed blood of flowers.
They would stick their piercing beaks
into a crown of petals until their heads
disappeared. The blossoms blurred into wings,
and the breathing I heard
was the thin, moving stems of wisteria.
That night, my face pressed against the window,
I looked out into the dark
where the moon drowned in the willows
by the pond. My heart, bloodstone,
turned. That long night, the farm,
those jeweled birds, all these gone years.
The horses standing quiet and huge
in the moon-crossing blackness.
~Joseph Stroud “First Song”

Birds are everywhere this time of year – I keep my phone handy with the Merlin App open from Cornell Lab, so I know who I’m hearing.
From the robins and sparrows, to warblers and thrushes, along with the chittering bald eagles nesting by the pond across the road, it is quite a symphony to witness in the early morning and at sunset.

The app even tries to identify a woodpecker’s rapping and a hummingbird’s buzz.

There was a time not long ago when I was too busy with daily details to pay much attention to the awesome variety of creatures around me.

Once it hit me what I was missing, I started watching, listening and being part of all this life rather than wondering too late where life had gone.

How sobering one day to find a hummingbird dead in the dirt,
once a dear little bird of motor and constant motion,
lying stilled and silenced
as if simply dropped from the sky,
a wee bit of fluff and stardust.

Then a friend pointed out a hummingbird nest high in a tree.
And so it is the way of things…

We are here and gone.
Beauty hatched, grown and flown, then grounded.
…but not forgotten.

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More Precious than Roses

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I am not resigned to the shutting away
of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost.

The answers quick and keen, the honest look,
the laughter, the love,—
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses.
Elegant and curled
Is the blossom.
Fragrant is the blossom. I know.
But I do not approve. 
More precious was the light in your eyes
than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
~Edna St. Vincent Millay “Dirge Without Music”

Each Memorial Day weekend without fail,
we gather with family, have lunch, reminisce,
and trek to a cemetery high above Puget Sound
to catch up with our relatives who lie there, still.

Some for over 110 years, some for barely more than a decade,
some we knew and loved and miss every day,
others not so much as they are unknown to us
except on genealogy charts,
names and dates and stones and stories:

the red-haired great-grandmother who died too young,
the aunt who was eight when lymphoma took her,
the grandmother who dreamed of world travel too late,
the great-grandfather Yukon river boat captain,
the grandfather logger and stump farmer,
the great aunt unmarried school teacher who hid an oil well,
the two in-laws who forever lie next to each other
but could not co-exist in the same room while they lived and breathed.

Yet we know each of these
(as we know ourselves and others)

could be tender and kind, though flawed and broken,
had been beautiful and strong, though wrinkled and frail,
was hopeful and faithful, though too soon in the ground.

We know this about them
as we know it about ourselves:
someday we too will feed roses,
the light in our eyes transformed into elegant swirls
emitting the fragrant scent of heaven.

No one asks if we approve.
Nor am I resigned to this
though I know:
So it is, so it has been, so it will be for me
someday.

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Trying Not to Cry

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People have said, “Don’t cry” to other people for years and years, and all it has ever meant is, “I’m too uncomfortable when you show your feelings.  Don’t cry.”  I’d rather have them say, “Go ahead and cry.  I’m here to be with you.”

~Mister Fred Rogers

I cry easily, always have. Certain songs and hymns will trigger tears, and of course, any rituals surrounding baptisms, funerals, weddings, and graduations.

Tears don’t bother me, whether they are my own or someone else’s. My medical office and exam rooms were always well- stocked with boxes of tissues as a safe place to cry it out.

One of my routine mental health history questions was “what will bring tears to your eyes – dicing onions doesn’t count?”  

Some patients would look at me blankly, not sure they ever remember crying, and others will weep at the mere suggestion.

No matter what the reason for someone’s tears, it is a powerful outward expression of human feeling, like a laugh or a grimace of pain. I watch for those cues and sometimes feel their emotion as surely as if it were my own.

Even tears can bring peace – like a river.

I am with you.  And always intend to be.

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Burned Up With Beauty

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i was talking to a moth
the other evening
he was trying to break into
an electric light bulb
and fry himself on the wires

why do you fellows
pull this stunt i asked him
because it is the conventional
thing for moths or why
if that had been an uncovered
candle instead of an electric
light bulb you would
now be a small unsightly cinder
have you no sense

plenty of it he answered
but at times we get tired
of using it
we get bored with the routine
and crave beauty
and excitement
fire is beautiful
and we know that if we get
too close it will kill us
but what does that matter
it is better to be happy
for a moment
and be burned up with beauty
than to live a long time
and be bored all the while
so we wad all our life up
into one little roll
and then we shoot the roll
that is what life is for
it is better to be a part of beauty
for one instant and then cease to
exist than to exist forever
and never be a part of beauty
our attitude toward life
is come easy go easy
we are like human beings
used to be before they became
too civilized to enjoy themselves

and before i could argue him
out of his philosophy
he went and immolated himself
on a patent cigar lighter
i do not agree with him
myself i would rather have
half the happiness and twice
the longevity
but at the same time i wish
there was something i wanted
as badly as he wanted to fry himself

archy (the cockroach)

~Don Marquis “The Lesson of the Moth”

One night a moth flew into the candle, was caught, burned dry, and held. I must have been staring at the candle, or maybe I looked up when a shadow crossed my page; at any rate, I saw it all…

Her moving wings ignited like tissue paper…

And then this moth essence, this spectacular skeleton, began to act as a wick. She kept burning. The wax rose in the moth’s body from her soaking abdomen to her thorax to the jagged hole where her head should be, and widened into flame, a saffron-yellow flame that robed her to the ground like any immolating monk. That candle had two wicks, two flames of identical height, side by side. The moth’s head was fire. She burned for two hours, until I blew her out.
~Annie Dillard from “The Death of the Moth” from Holy the Firm

The struggle was over.

The insignificant little creature now knew death. As I looked at the dead moth, this minute wayside triumph of so great a force over so mean an antagonist filled me with wonder. Just as life had been strange a few minutes before, so death was now as strange.

The moth having righted himself now lay most decently and uncomplainingly composed. O yes, he seemed to say, death is stronger than I am.
~Virginia Woolf from “The Death of a Moth”

I too would take half the happiness and twice the longevity over one moment of ecstasy.

But I admire the blind passion of a tiny creature who will beat itself senseless on a light bulb, or fly into a flame to become cinders, or struggle so hard to live upright rather than upside down, that it dies in the struggle.

Why are famous poets and essayists fascinated by the tiny deaths they witness on their front porches, in their kitchens or at their writing desk?

Death is never tiny at all.
Nevertheless, death is ceasing to be,
after a unique and intentional creation,
whether a moth, a mother, or ourselves.

We live today. Look for a moment of beauty to enjoy.
Let’s be sensible about what we want so badly.
As one tiny part of matter, we matter.
And when we die, it is never a tiny death.

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Lyrics:
A day may come that asks of us all we have to give:
a day we never would have sought and yet we have to live.
If it should be our destiny to live in such a day,
let our faith and love be worthy of the ones who showed the way.
The ones we now call heroes
The ones we say their memory will not die –
they were no different in their day than you or I.
They were no different in their day. than you or I.
~Grahame Davies

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Merging with the Shadows

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For Nanda Devi Unsoeld: 1954–1976

Before the second summit party began the ascent
of the princess of mountains, an ominous black cloud
settled slowly around the summit block, persuading
us to take a rest day, but morale was good.
The next day at seven in the evening, my daughter
Devi was on her last pitch, and it took her until
midnight to haul up over the final lip. A long day.

Two days later, a blizzard kept us in our tents, but
the next morning, Devi was stricken, saying calmly,
“She is calling me. I am going to die,” before
she fell into unconsciousness.
I tried to revive her, mouth-to-mouth,
but felt her lips grow cold against mine.
We had lost her. My daughter was gone.
I and the other climbers wept.

Her fiancé Andy and I bundled her in her sleeping
bag and slipped her off the precipice of the North-
East face. I said we had committed her to the deep.
She had been the driving force behind this expedition,
as she was inexorably drawn to her namesake.
The Bliss-Giving Goddess had claimed her own.
An excerpt from her last diary is inscribed
on a stone placed in a high-altitude meadow of Patai:

“I stand on a windswept ridge at night with the stars
bright above and I am no longer alone but I waver
and merge with all the shadows that surround me.
I am part of the whole and I am content.”
~Eleanor Swanson, Last Light on the West Face of Nanda Devi from Non Finito

Nanda Devi peak, courtesy of Stanford Alpine Club

The ripple effect from Nanda Devi Unsoeld’s arrival as a new junior in Olympia High School in 1970 reached me within minutes, as I felt the impact of her presence on campus immediately. One of my friends elbowed me, pointing out a new girl being escorted down the hall by the assistant principal. Students stared at the wake she left behind: Devi had wildly flowing wavy long blonde hair, a friendly smile and bold curious eyes greeting everyone she met.

From the neck up, she fit right in with the standard appearance at the time: as the younger sisters of the 60’s generation of free thinking flower children, we tried to emulate them in our dress and style, going braless and choosing bright colors and usually skirts that were too short and tight. There was the pretense we didn’t really care how we looked, but of course we did care very much, with hours spent daily preparing the “casual carefree” look that would perfectly express our freedom from fashion trends amid our feminist longings.

Practicing careful nonconformity perfectly fit our peers’ expectations and aggravated our parents.

But Devi never looked like she cared what anyone else thought of her.  The high school girls honestly weren’t sure what to make of her, speculating together whether she was “for real” and viewed her somewhat suspiciously, as if she was putting on an act.

The high school boys were mesmerized.

She preferred baggy torn khaki shorts or peasant skirts with uneven hems, loose fitting faded T shirts and ripped tennis shoes without shoelaces. Her bare legs were covered with long blonde hair, as were her armpits which she showed off while wearing tank tops. She pulled whole cucumbers from her backpack in class and ate them like cobs of corn, rind and all. She smelled like she had been camping without a shower for three days, but then riding her bike to school from her home 11 miles away in all kinds of weather accounted for that. One memorable day she arrived a bit late to school, pushing her bike through 6 inches of snow in soaking tennis shoes, wearing her usual broad smile of satisfaction.

As a daughter of two Peace Corps workers who had just moved back to the U.S. after years of service in Nepal, Devi had lived very little of her life in the United States. Her father Willi Unsoeld, one of the first American climbers to reach the summit of Mt. Everest up the difficult west face, had recently accepted a professorship in comparative religion at new local Evergreen College. He moved his wife and family back to the northwest to be near his beloved snowy peaks, suddenly immersing four children in an affluent culture that seemed foreign and wasteful.

Devi recycled before there was a word for it simply by never buying anything new and never throwing anything useful away, involved herself in social justice issues before anyone had coined the phrase, and was an activist behind the scenes more often than a leader, facilitating and encouraging others to speak out at anti-war rallies, organizing sit-ins for world hunger and volunteering in the local soup kitchen. She mentored adolescent peers to get beyond their self-consciousness and self-absorption to explore the world beyond the security of high school walls.

Regretfully, few of us followed her lead. We preferred the relative security and camaraderie of hanging out at the local drive-in to taking a shift at the local 24-hour crisis line. We showed up for our graduation ceremony in caps and gowns while the rumor was that Devi stood at the top of Mt. Rainier with her father that day.

I never saw Devi after high school but heard of her plans in 1976 to climb with an expedition to the summit of Nanda Devi, the peak in India for which she was named. She never returned, dying in her father’s arms as she suffered severe abdominal pain and irreversible high altitude sickness just below the summit. She lies forever buried in the ice on that faraway peak in India. 

Her father died in an avalanche only a few years later, as he led an expedition of Evergreen students on a climb on Mt. Rainier, only 60 miles from home. Her mother, Jolene, later served in Congress from our district in Washington state.

Had Devi lived these last 50 years, I have no doubt she would have led our generation with her combination of charismatic boldness and excitement about each day’s new adventure. She lived without pretense, without hiding behind a mask of fad and fashion and conformity and without any desire for wealth or comfort.

I wish I had learned what she had to teach me when she sat beside me in class, encouraging me by her example to become someone more than the dictates of societal expectations. I secretly admired the freedom she embodied in not being concerned in the least about fitting in. Instead, I still mourn her loss all these years later, having to be content with the legacy she has now left behind on a snowy mountain peak that called her by name.

Mt. Shuksan, Washington state
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