Category Archives: grief

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Heaven and hell

Hell is other people. Heaven too.
How much do you adjust for this person?
The one who is only available when I am damaged
a foul weather friend, unexpected,
busy with all the damaged around,
never time to play. This one hides much
and slips into denial like a familiar cloak.
I am sad. That one talks about others, ah, gossip
I hate it. This one has a blind spot I could
drive a truck through. I wonder why? I am curious.
I read that women are still expected to be responsible
for the house. They are praised or blamed if the home
appears perfect or a mess. I am clearing my main floor
to resemble this idea of what a house should look like
but reading that I wonder. Is it worth it? My decor
is packrat cat lady, though only two cats. No self respecting
burgler would come in as they would trip and fall,
over cats or stuff. Stuff on the stairs: I don’t care
and know that at 65 I will be counseled in my “free”
medicare wellness visit, that I’ve paid for through
all my working years, to make sure my house is uncluttered
reducing fall risk. Hell is other people and heaven too.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: hell.

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Peace Plague

If I can be anything I want to be
today let me be a peace plague.

Let me be a peace plague, airborne,
spread fast in the air
just a breath of wind
two neighbors who are angry stand at a fence
one drops a rake, the other a hose
they stare at each other. “Come to tea,”
says one, and the other comes.
Someone stops writing a letter of complaint
and gathers blankets for the warming center instead.
A policeman aims at a kid with a gun
shouts “Freeze.” and then he freezes too
on an intaken breath, and the kid drops the gun
hands up, breathing my plague.
And in a war zone, one side chokes on the air
and stops firing. The other aims and stops as well.
Both fall to their knees and weep. After time,
some get up and start gathering the wounded. Others
tear sheets into bandages and yet others start moving the rubble
finding the bodies. The bodies must be found and buried
in holy ground before rebuilding. My cousin
opens her mouth to gossip again and inhales and chokes
and stops. She says something other than she had planned.
Peace spreads like a wave, like a plague, and everyone
looks for someone to help.

If I can be anything I want to be
today I want to be a plague of peace.

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Delicate

I think of what is delicate in all our wide wild world
Our world itself? Yes, but more. Peace among people? No, peace
is strong as war, peace lifts my heart and roars, hoping others hear.
Most delicate is the human heart, all humans. Covid has damaged
the human hearts, we fear, we grieve, we stress and lash out
and so we go to war and wars and argue with each other.
Human hearts turn outward, we cannot see the virus and feel helpless
as the subtle battle is fought and doctors and nurses and scientists
research and die. Human hearts want an enemy they can see, they can fight
and what is better than another human? Every human is different
so there are many choices, to fight over the differences. Let us stop.
Gather our wounded, clear the rubble, find the dead and bury them.
Let us stop and cry and weep and tear our hair.
Let us mourn as a world our dead and the damage to the human heart.

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For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: delicate.

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Tamped

The Ragtag Daily Prompt is “trial by fire“.

Which makes me think of the wars, ongoing and restarting, and the fire and death. What do we get out of killing children? Burning homes and families. I don’t understand. Revenge? To “teach a lesson”? I think it will only teach more hate.

So this morning I am listening to the Bach Magnificat and then the Rutter Magnificat. Tamp the flames of hate and lift my voice in song and may the world work towards peace. I light my candles in the early morning in prayer for us all.

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Welcome dark

This morning I listened to this song and album.

https://thewinetree.bandcamp.com/album/kentucky

I bought the CD over a year ago at the nowhereelse festival in Ohio. I heard The Winetree live and thought it was gorgeous. I bought others for myself but this was for a friend. Today I realize that the entire album, every song, has sorrow and longing.

Which makes it an interesting choice for someone who said, “I am always happy.” The first time he said that, I thought, wow. That is not true. I don’t believe that, so who are you lying to? Himself first, right? Because it seemed so obviously not true.

I never gave him the album because he stopped talking to me.

When someone says an absolute, that is a red flag for me. I wonder if the CD was for the emotions that he is not in contact with and stuffs. I went through a time where I tried to unstuff all the old emotions that I hid in my complex and frightening household growing up. My biggest ones were grief, fear and humiliation. It was not safe to express those: they would be made into a story to entertain people. I started to deal with them two years after my mother died. My sister did too.

This poem, Butterfly Girl Comes to Visit, is about my sister and my unacceptable emotions. Another, Ride Forth, is about stuffing feelings and then bringing them up and letting them go. I’m not saying we are ever done. I don’t know if we are. I thought of it as going to the depths of the ocean. The trunk at the bottom is full of terrifying monsters, but I had to open it anyhow. And at the bottom or somewhere in the trunk, is Hope, just like Pandora’s box. It took a couple of years of work to get to hope. It was so hard in counseling that my days off were more difficult than clinic, and that is saying a lot, because clinic is hard work.

Our culture is so afraid of the dark and of emotions. By doing my difficult work, I could be present and tolerate patients’ often difficult emotions and say, “Well, I can understand why you would feel that way. It is a really difficult situation.”

I do not want to be happy all the time. I think that is silly. What I want is to feel my emotions, in real time, and be honest with myself about them. As Rumi says, grief may be sweeping your house clean for a new joy. How can we love without grieving?

Welcome to the rain and the winter and the dark, and welcome to resting and quiet, and the hope that the sun will return.

And on the other side: My mom loved me.

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Tornado

I am having nightmares most nights. I don’t think they are about work any more: I think they are about the wars and the people being killed and terror on both sides. That is what terrifies me.

I am in a very big hotel, down near the ground floor at a conference center. There is an announcement: “There is a very violent tornado on the ground, take shelter.” People at the windows are exclaiming. I go to the picture window and see a huge tornado. But I also see my ex-husband and another man, talking, facing me. How can they not hear the tornado? I want to shout, but they won’t hear me through the thick glass. The tornado swallows them and I find a place near the windows. I am on the floor, arms and legs wrapped around an old style radiator attached to the wall. I hope this will keep me from being sucked out as the windows break, and if the building comes down, I am near an outer wall.

I wake up.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: terror.

I took the photograph on a train going from Edmonds, Washington to Chicago, IL in July 2014. This is a beautiful and terrifying storm.

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Black and white

Pandas are black and white, clarity
between the parts, yet both are present together
Pandemic has lessened humans charity
Stress rises, fights and a turn to war weather.
It’s hard to fight a virus way smaller than a bee
And as they change and attack birds and us anew
Frustration rises and we attack the humans that we see
We take sides, black or white, and don’t see that we’re a stew
Perspective changes, white to black and back
The pandas eat their daily bamboo pounds
Unworried which parts are white or black
I hope they are far from the crying bombing rounds
I hope every person has the charity
to give all others love and parity.

We are singing Frostiana, poems by Robert Frost, set to music by Randall Thompson, in chorus. The ending of this makes me cry:
“So when at times the mob is swayed
To carry praise or blame too far
We may choose something like a star
To stay our minds on and be staid.”

I took the photograph in Oregon this month, on a Pandasonic (ha, ha).

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: clarity.

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Fun in hell

Even when I go through hell on earth
mother dies, marriage crumbles
sister cancer, father cries
divorce, sister dies
pneumonia, pneumonia, pneumonia
can’t breathe and still have to defend myself
when accused of crazy and reported
Bitch is not a psychiatric disorder
hypoxia is not a psychiatric disorder
my cousin helps my niece to sue me
I never thought my family would have lawsuits
never
yet my sister sets them to explode
after she dies

I don’t quite die
though it is pretty rough
and grief tears at my throat
like a wolf, like a lion
like a hyena,
piranhas
I have two children and I stay
because they do not deserve this mess
I guard and fight and stay present

And there is laughter
even in hell
I time a comment and my daughter
snorts milk out her nose
I tell my children I shouldn’t handle knives
because of a meeting at work
“Five against one?” says my son
“Yes,” I say
“Well, they didn’t have enough people, did they?”
And I laugh and we go out to dinner.

Is this my fault?
Is it something I did?
The marriage was me, yes,
I do two years of counseling
trying to understand
I can’t change it
but maybe I can understand

A sort of a friend
ok
a false friend
a liar
says he never changes.
I say I always try to learn
I want to know
I want to grow
how can he not grow?
how can he refuse to learn?

he doesn’t talk to me any more
he stops speaking to people forever
but
there is no forever
there is now and the Beloved
and the dark and the light are united
after death
will you be a proton
or an electron
or gravity?

There are hells on earth
worse than mine
prayers
I send prayers
for the innocents
everyone was newborn
and innocent
once