I hope this finds you well

Letter #8: a poem I wrote for my mother on the anniversary of her death, flowers to cheer us up, and nice pirates

Anniversaries become important. That’s one thing I know. I’m starting to feel expert at loss—perhaps that’s why we’re all fumbling around here—and I wish I had better advice for what to do in the dark, other than get a good flash light, but I know that anniversaries are a thing. A sign that time is passing even though you are moored where you are, to that time and place where they left you. Yes, they softly tell us, time is passing, even though this world feels like a dream and you’ve left your hallway light on again—that’s where the ache comes from.

This week as I prepared for the anniversary of my mother's death, my paternal grandmother passed away. She was 97 and lived an incredible, iconic life; and she was, I think, ready to go. So it’s different from the tragic nature of many of the other losses in my life, but why this week, just four days before the day that marks the death of my mother? Please someone whisper the answer so our teacher doesn’t hear and take another woman away from me. It also makes me giggle a little thinking of my mother being the one to welcome my grandmother to the other side; but that’s another story.

April marks the month that we lost my maternal grandmother and my maternal aunt, my mother’s youngest sister. August is the month that we lost my paternal grandfather and my paternal aunt, my father’s older sister. And now March, resistant to her measured tread, will mark the passing of both my mother and my paternal grandmother.

I think I have come to understand that death must be more intelligent than us. A pattern seeker. Not a dark void, like most mysteries would lead us to believe, but an opening. A wound that doesn’t fester but peels back into the skin asking you to open further, for the membrane between life and death really isn’t that thick at all. And if I am looking for a way to measure my days, these wounds and markers, though they may be painful, are a constellation in the dark. Buoys of memory, asking me to peel myself back, again and again.

---

I hope this finds you well (a poem for my mother)

Is what people often write when starting a correspondence
as if to imagine the recipient—pink-cheeked at the mailbox—
slicing open a fresh letter with ivory, well and alive

Instead, I am alone in a quiet car after school drop-off
imagining all the thoughts I’ve sent your way,
wrapped up in silken ribbon like a prayer

Because, mother, they say everything is killing us these days
and I just want to know if I can freeze the chicken.
Where does a ladder stitch end and should I take the antibiotics?
I feel unwell and certainly you would know how to save me

I didn’t swallow the pill; maybe you already know.
But I did stand in the garden to watch the roses grow
and I pinned an antique brooch on my jacket in defiance,
for someone has to make this place beautiful while you’re away

The nursery camera says something is moving in there
but the room is empty and no one is home.
Is it you, mother? Did you knock his art from the doorway?
It keeps falling and I’m just wondering, no begging really,
that you’ve come to show my son what the word beauty means

I’m still trying to make it home, this place;
but it's so hard to wake from sleep some days
when I’m so long from living in your olive belly like a moon,
so far away from your heart—
alive and beating like the most magnificent drum

Mother's Roses; Mother's Brooch

---

The References

On Reading

I finally read Grief is for People by Sloane Crosley, which people have been pointing me towards like a lighthouse for ages. I found it to be devastating, somehow still deeply witty, and ever so human. A meditation on friendship and loss, and sometimes the publishing industry (which provides some juicy bits). It’s a very profound look at grief and I’d share my copy but it’s covered in the ink of recognition. Which, is perhaps why I keep writing about grief here. Seeing your open wound on the flesh of another—hey, you have that too?—always makes me feel more connected, more human. So thanks for bearing with me. I mean it.

On Listening

Spotify sometimes does nice things for me and this afternoon as I was driving toward a quiet writing spot (sponsored by my beloved mother in law), the song Flowers by Nathaniel Rateliff and Gregory Alan Isakov was waiting for me. I love a male duet; it always makes me nostalgic for Girl from the North Country, as sung by Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash, who my mother adored. I still squeeze my son into a Johnny Cash shirt my mom bought him, even though it has holes and the tags reads 24 months. Denial is cute sometimes, at least when my son wears it. Between this and the the floral songwriting, it was “curtains for me.”

Oh, and if you love Girl from the North Country like I do, you must listen to this.

On Motherhood

Can someone here help prepare me for age five? I feel it on the precipice and I’m unraveling. On the way home from school this week my son proudly proclaimed that he had “grown bigger and was 17 now.” “Mom, this means I can drive YOU to school.” After which I nearly fainted. Simultaneously, this morning while we were playing nice pirates (it’s a thing) on his new top bunk (SOS), he told me that he was my baby and asked to be held and rocked and sang to. Perhaps we’re all just trying to learn how to pull both closer and away from that thing that made us.

Thanks for reading, especially today.

xx
Meghan