Reflections: Grief and Spring in Everyday Ramblings

The only patch of yellow iris I know about in the neighborhood coming on the other day. The community garden which is in a fair amount of shade has a few beautiful stands of tall purple iris coming on now. I was down there just after sunrise this morning and there was this lovely subtle fragrance in the air. I was wondering if it was the raspberries as they are starting to blossom.

In a conversation recently with my niece she told me she enjoyed getting pictures of flowers via email. Be still my heart. She had her last chemo infusion midweek this week (Yay!) and I sent her colorful pictures I had taken out and about the day before. Lilac, iris, clematis. This was so she would have something spring saturated to stare at in the chair.

She told me she was having trouble finding lilac blooms at the local florist and was thinking about going back over to Bainbridge Island where she used to live and left a part of her heart to get a cutting from a bush she missed. I found a florist that would deliver a living lilac in a pretty decorative pot and ordered that for her. She was cheered when I told her.

Sometimes we don’t have to do everything ourselves, you know.

Choosing to teach supporting grief as my overarching class topic last week was surprisingly rewarding. I learned a lot about what all the experts are saying about moving through it and supporting it and with the poems I picked we had some meaningful conversations as a group.

It turns out one of the class participants had lost her sister last month and although she was able to see her sister before she died she was unable to go to the memorial service in Nebraska that was happening during the same timeframe of our Friday class. Her telling us this was quite touching.

I knew she had lost her sister but no details. I also knew that one of the other participants had a memorial service on Thursday for her brother-in-law. And another participant had lost a very beloved pet the week before.

They all told me when they saw grief was the topic, they were kind of, ugh, really? But two of them told me privately that all the things we covered were helpful to them specifically and how strange it is that we just plain don’t talk about sorrow and loss and how to manage and move through it and to support others who are experiencing these things.

At some point someone asked me why I had chosen the topic. I said that I knew a number of people working with it but wasn’t dealing with acute grief. But then I thought, wait a minute…

My beloved ex-husband is dying. That counts. Truly, it does. Yesterday his wife posted a whole bunch of pictures of him on Facebook. He is in an intensive care facility in Seattle, and she said he was having a transfusion on Friday. I don’t know his status, but it isn’t encouraging.

It was so strange to scroll through all the pictures. From before our marriage and after. (There is a timeline hole there). I do have pictures, in a box somewhere, not digitized. He was so handsome, and I was so in love…

I was most touched to see pictures with his kind and wonderful parents. He is only 74. To me that is young. Too young to shrug off this mortal coil, but hey I am not anywhere near in charge.

One of the things that was helpful was hearing my students talk to me about what worked for them in the five poems I read over the week and what didn’t. It is such a tricky line to write to, the universal aspects of loss without making it too personal. Because loss is so both.

Anyway, this was their favorite poem…
next week I teach…sleep.

Grief
BY BARBARA CROOKER

is a river you wade in until you get to the other side.
But I am here, stuck in the middle, water parting
around my ankles, moving downstream
over the flat rocks. I’m not able to lift a foot,
move on. Instead, I’m going to stay here
in the shallows with my sorrow, nurture it
like a cranky baby, rock it in my arms.
I don’t want it to grow up, go to school, get married.
It’s mine. Yes, the October sunlight wraps me
in its yellow shawl, and the air is sweet
as a golden Tokay. On the other side,
there are apples, grapes, walnuts,
and the rocks are warm from the sun.
But I’m going to stand here,
growing colder, until every inch
of my skin is numb. I can’t cross over.
Then you really will be gone.