At 13 I lost my baby sister in a tragic accident in our home. I’ve lived with survivor’s guilt for several decades now. Recently I was thinking once again of her and why am I still here at almost 80 years of age when she had only a couple of years and I suddenly thought: “You are meant to live life to the fullest for yourself, yes, but also for her. You’re living for her as well.” I smiled and laughed and have been doing so ever since, living with great joy and tremendous gratitude for being able to do so. I imagine she is smiling and laughing with me.
What comes to mind is gratitude for my sadness. I did not have a terrible or traumatic childhood, but my earliest memories are pierced with a pervading sense of melancholy and loneliness. I learned to mostly hide my sadness, goded by my mother's frequent commands to "Cheer up!" But sadness has always been my companion.
My life was ripped apart by tragedy in my early 40's when my younger son died. I was plunged into an entirely different dimension of sadness, despair, almost unendurable grief. But I did endure it. I have found a way to hold it and continue to live and love and grow. There remains that familiar climate of sadness in my heart. But it mostly doesn't hinder me from seeing beauty and feeling joy. I believe it has helped survive. I am grateful to have always had a sense that life includes suffering. I'm grateful for my sadness.
My son died from a drug overdose at age 29. I was 61. It took a number of years but a poem bubbled up for him. He was an avid roller bladder until he was 20 and hit on his scooter by a car & no longer could skate due to some damage. A lovely child with addiction abuse.
Dear Galen
I still turn when I hear someone say
“Mama” in a manly voice
as I push my grocery cart along the aisles.
Always your mama; you a part of me.
At your memorial, I led your tribe in a guided
meditation – deep breath in, deep breath out,
releasing you; setting you free to fly
to realms we cannot fathom.
I didn’t want us to hold your spirit back.
So many friends and family
gathered in love and grief.
You would have had a great time
stirring up the sadness with laughter.
We shared lots of soulful music,
bountiful food and, of course,
plenty of beer. Legendary accounts
were told of your time on earth,
ribald, poignant, funny, sad.
I suspect you may be frequently
seen now dancing across the heavens
spinning an angel in a do-si-do as you fly by.
I hope you are grinding rails,
practicing spectacular roller blade tricks
with some radical new homies,
the pearly gates probably worse for the wear.
Your white robes flowing behind you
as you flash by, wheels wildly spinning,
the sounds of your skates bumping
across the golden cobblestones
interrupting heavenly choirs.
You should join a choir and lead them
in some rap tunes – glory halleluiah!
Sure to be the latest rage across all of heaven.
When you saunter into The Golden Halo Bar,
your own halo rakishly perched atop your long brown curls, and say “Hey babydolls; what’s up”,
I can just see all those angels flushing deep pink
against their white robes, their night about to get a lot more lively. You have always been good at sharing love and laughter.
I surmise you caused St. Peter to scratch his head
Thank you for this comment. I’m at the very beginnings of grief from losing my oldest son. I hope someday to be grateful, too. But for now, there are some things in which I cannot be grateful. This thread and post has helped.
Dear Raquel, I'm so sorry that your son is gone. The very beginning of grief is overwhelmingly difficult. Know that you are not alone. Something that helped me a lot was realizing how pissed my son would be with me if I allowed his death to destroy me. I knew I had to find a way to live in order to honor him. But it takes the time it takes.
oh, yes, Suzy. I understand this. Gratitude for being able to feel. Have you read Susan Cain's book, Bittersweet, How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole?
I'm so sorry for the loss of your son. I have often questioned how I would handle such grief. It seems we have no choice but to find a place to let it rest within us.
Your comments bring to mind something I read in James Galvin's work, The Meadow. Among much of his lovely language is a perhaps-handed-down western observation that one of the folks he wrote about didn't have moods, he had "weather." For reasons both obvious and inscrutable, this phrase "clears the air" for my many moods and allows them space to be both undeniable but also perfectly natural.
"There remains that familiar climate of sadness in my heart." What a beautiful expression of how grief remains with us, influences us. Yet, even in that climate, we continue to breathe, walk, love. And our capacity to carry the never diminishing grief increases with time.
Such a beautiful poem. Padraig, I wonder if poetry is the window through which the other you is shouting. But if that’s the case, then the word is still muffled maybe?
I want to share my own poem about thankfulness - sort of…
It seems counter-cultural and risky to say, but gratitude for my daughter has been hard-won.
She's always been a great kid, and I've always been grateful for her - but there is an ambivalence there also (in the sense you've mentioned). My wife had a traumatic birth and suffered with postnatal depression and PTSD. I then suffered with my own mental health issues once my wife had recovered. There were times when gratitude was the last thing on the agenda!
Five years in, and we're mostly there now, but the light is definitely contrasted with plenty of grey - and we're at a place now that we're able to look back at both with gratitude.
I have hard-earned gratitude for my turbulent childhood and my parents. It's not an easy thing to grow up with an erratic, strongly bipolar father who was in and out of mental institutions and a mother with frail health and waning energy. As a young teen, I wanted to be erased from this planet. But over time I became grateful for both my parents who I realized were trying their very best and never without love for each other and us kids. And most difficult - I came to a place of gratitude for growing up in that situation. I developed a strong core of resilience and a deep, abiding respect and empathy for those who struggle with mental health. It has influenced everything from my career path to the way I find beautiful things to value in this imperfect world.
That's a fabulous poem about your other self, Pádraig. It encapsulates for me the life's process of at once Becoming and Unselfing. I'm on a humbling journey of cancer, remission and ongoing, precarious medical monitoring. I'm learning gratitude, very late in my life, for my own body. How strong it has proven itself to be, how deep are its reserves of energy and wisdom. I now listen more carefully to it, and I'm learning many surprising things from it.
I have heard people express gratitude for their cancer, something I can never ever feel. But I can feel grateful for the lessons it has taught me and continues to teach me about resilience, how to ask for help, forgiveness, humility, and acceptance of my new body with its scars and limitations. Most of all the gratitude that I am still here.
Jennifer, I agree about cancer not being a blessing. But it did lead to my writing a book of poetry about my mother‘s breast cancer and my own called Given Time: a mother daughter cancer memoir. When I read out loud from the book, I’m able to capture both my love and my grief for my mother‘s death. That wouldn’t have happened without the book or without my cancer diagnosis.
I am grateful that I can be myself. It is hard-won because we all are different and feel ouselves to be different. And to me it long seemed there are more people different in the same way, not mine. It took some time to find those that are different in my way. To whom I am not too much, but energetic, not scary, but funny, not too weird (because they are too), not too strong (because they see it for the weakness it is). I am truly grateful they have given me back my selfcompassion.
I am thankful for you, Mr Ó Tuama. You are a beautiful human being, and by sharing yourself you help others become as human as they can be, more than you will ever know. So thank you for being you, and for being so generous with yourself and those who come in contact with you. It means more than you think. Thank you, thank you, thank you for the poetry you reveal and bring into the world :)
My first marriage was over a decade of living with a very broken, unhappy person who preferred to maintain his identity as a victim of the wounds he knew rather than open himself up to the possibility of healing. When I finally physically left that abusive relationship, I then had to endure another decade of co-parenting two young men with this difficult, wounded person - trying to always provide a safe space for them when not with their father. At times it was so painful dealing with their father's verbal & psychological abuse that there were moments I contemplated dropping out of their lives just so that I would no longer have to deal with their father & the accumulation of legal bills in dealing with his contentiousness in trying to protect them. However, I stayed the course, & as my sons are both now adults & are making similar decisions about distancing them from the toxicity of their father, I am grateful that I did not give up on maintaining my relationships with them - that I am still generally welcomed into their lives as they are navigating into adulthood.
That tough decision of whether to stay or leave the closest of family in order to thrive in one's own life is so personal, so fraught. Im so glad your decision paid off with layers of rich rewards.
This is a common topic for conversation with me. I suffered from mental and physical abuse as a child. Sadly and gratefully it led me to work in caring professions. I understood their stories because I'd lived similar and could therefor provide the light for a new path for them.
Each week your missives seem to reach into my mind and nudge me a litte further forward with something I'm stuck on. The line where you say "There are other things that I will never have gratitude for, because it was a terror to survive the suffering and I’m amazed I did" gave me pause. Life has served me abandonment and grief in many guises. When those I trust in my life comment on how strong I am at having coped it surprises me because I don't feel like I'm a special case. I did not dissolve after my marriage ended or spend weeks in bed after the untimely death of my mother. Yet, the stories I create in my mind about who I am in relation to these experiences cause me no end of turmoil. Because I have gone seeking, I understand that those who cannot suffer evade their pain instead of turning towards it with curiosity. Perhaps, I cannot suffer because I am too busy ruminating, to turn towards my pain, acknowledge it and let it go? My future self also whispered poetry to me which has led me here, and provided another idea for a poem. Thanks ☺️
I chuckled at your comment, because I relate. There is a special delight when some small thing that baffles me suddenly resolves. It can sometimes change how I experience the whole day (or in memory, a long time). Thanks for your reminder that sometimes a small delight can awaken gratitude, too!
The story of my marriage. I was woefully unhappy as a married person. For the 20 years of my life that I was married, I was also still deeply embedded in conservative theology. Leaving was not an option. Staying was what was holy and right. So every single day, for probably 18 of those 20 years, I PRAYED. "Help", as Anne Lamont would say, was my most consistent prayer. Help me be better. Help me be loving. Help me be supportive. Help me be different, feel different, act different. And woefully unhappy I stayed. I honestly often wished I was no longer living, except that I deeply loved my children. Eventually I left both my belief-system and my marriage (within months of each other but in that order) and the next 20 years have been a journey of attempted understanding.
My ex-husband, after some years, met and married a woman with two young sons. Their father was not able to be involved in their lives. And his new wife was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer just after they met. She lived a short while (2 years perhaps) and then she passed away. Those little boys were then raised to young adulthood by my ex-husband.
I really thought God had never answered all those prayers of mine. I was so angry and felt so hopeless about belief. But I wonder now if the "help" I received was the strength to do what I needed to do to get better. To make the impossible decisions that I made. I feel, now, so much gratitude for the capacity to feel joy. And so much gratitude for whatever was redemptive on the far side of those excruciating decisions. I'm not certain I am answering the question of a hard-won gratitude, or if this is just a reframe of my story. But I know I feel deep gratitude. Here. And now. For all of this.
I am grateful for having my position eliminated after moving across the country to take it. It did get me to where I wanted to be and away from an organization whose culture was not a good match. It was a shocking unexpected way in which I was dismissed, and it rocked me to my core. However, after a few months, I found a different position that is a better match for me.
I recall when the sun was an insult
And I drew the shades first thing
And went into the clothes closet
Looking for mourning wear
And there, I caught the scent of you,
Buried my face in your old work shirt
where grief met gratitude.
Oh, that last line. So many times I have written "may your grief be accompanied by gratitude." And it is that mingling that I have experienced.
Such a lovely poem; thank you for sharing it
Beautiful. I live in AZ and understand your first line! But understand that greeting morning sun is a struggle in the midst of grief. Hugs and peace.
Christine - this is so lovely. I’m working on a memoir focused on leave-takings - and I’d love your permission to use this spot-on poem.
Sure, Barrie. (just give credit in a footnote, please). All the best to you with your memoir work.
Christine
Extraordinary
Beautiful. “the sun was an insult”
At 13 I lost my baby sister in a tragic accident in our home. I’ve lived with survivor’s guilt for several decades now. Recently I was thinking once again of her and why am I still here at almost 80 years of age when she had only a couple of years and I suddenly thought: “You are meant to live life to the fullest for yourself, yes, but also for her. You’re living for her as well.” I smiled and laughed and have been doing so ever since, living with great joy and tremendous gratitude for being able to do so. I imagine she is smiling and laughing with me.
What comes to mind is gratitude for my sadness. I did not have a terrible or traumatic childhood, but my earliest memories are pierced with a pervading sense of melancholy and loneliness. I learned to mostly hide my sadness, goded by my mother's frequent commands to "Cheer up!" But sadness has always been my companion.
My life was ripped apart by tragedy in my early 40's when my younger son died. I was plunged into an entirely different dimension of sadness, despair, almost unendurable grief. But I did endure it. I have found a way to hold it and continue to live and love and grow. There remains that familiar climate of sadness in my heart. But it mostly doesn't hinder me from seeing beauty and feeling joy. I believe it has helped survive. I am grateful to have always had a sense that life includes suffering. I'm grateful for my sadness.
My son died from a drug overdose at age 29. I was 61. It took a number of years but a poem bubbled up for him. He was an avid roller bladder until he was 20 and hit on his scooter by a car & no longer could skate due to some damage. A lovely child with addiction abuse.
Dear Galen
I still turn when I hear someone say
“Mama” in a manly voice
as I push my grocery cart along the aisles.
Always your mama; you a part of me.
At your memorial, I led your tribe in a guided
meditation – deep breath in, deep breath out,
releasing you; setting you free to fly
to realms we cannot fathom.
I didn’t want us to hold your spirit back.
So many friends and family
gathered in love and grief.
You would have had a great time
stirring up the sadness with laughter.
We shared lots of soulful music,
bountiful food and, of course,
plenty of beer. Legendary accounts
were told of your time on earth,
ribald, poignant, funny, sad.
I suspect you may be frequently
seen now dancing across the heavens
spinning an angel in a do-si-do as you fly by.
I hope you are grinding rails,
practicing spectacular roller blade tricks
with some radical new homies,
the pearly gates probably worse for the wear.
Your white robes flowing behind you
as you flash by, wheels wildly spinning,
the sounds of your skates bumping
across the golden cobblestones
interrupting heavenly choirs.
You should join a choir and lead them
in some rap tunes – glory halleluiah!
Sure to be the latest rage across all of heaven.
When you saunter into The Golden Halo Bar,
your own halo rakishly perched atop your long brown curls, and say “Hey babydolls; what’s up”,
I can just see all those angels flushing deep pink
against their white robes, their night about to get a lot more lively. You have always been good at sharing love and laughter.
I surmise you caused St. Peter to scratch his head
and ask God “Was I supposed to let this one in?”
I’m sure God smiled benevolently and answered
“Oh yeah dude. It was high time to shake
things up!” We miss you shaking things up
here on Earth but keep the love flowing above
and we’ll keep it flowing here on Earth.
Love always your Mama; you a part of me.
Suzy Lawrence 2019
♥️ the “voice” and language of your son throughout the poem. Even God got in on it.
Thank you for this comment. I’m at the very beginnings of grief from losing my oldest son. I hope someday to be grateful, too. But for now, there are some things in which I cannot be grateful. This thread and post has helped.
Dear Raquel, I'm so sorry that your son is gone. The very beginning of grief is overwhelmingly difficult. Know that you are not alone. Something that helped me a lot was realizing how pissed my son would be with me if I allowed his death to destroy me. I knew I had to find a way to live in order to honor him. But it takes the time it takes.
oh, yes, Suzy. I understand this. Gratitude for being able to feel. Have you read Susan Cain's book, Bittersweet, How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole?
I'm so sorry for the loss of your son. I have often questioned how I would handle such grief. It seems we have no choice but to find a place to let it rest within us.
Your comments bring to mind something I read in James Galvin's work, The Meadow. Among much of his lovely language is a perhaps-handed-down western observation that one of the folks he wrote about didn't have moods, he had "weather." For reasons both obvious and inscrutable, this phrase "clears the air" for my many moods and allows them space to be both undeniable but also perfectly natural.
Your comment about whether so fits in with a book review article on Seamus Heaney‘s new collected poems —that is a phrase he absolutely would’ve used
"There remains that familiar climate of sadness in my heart." What a beautiful expression of how grief remains with us, influences us. Yet, even in that climate, we continue to breathe, walk, love. And our capacity to carry the never diminishing grief increases with time.
Such a beautiful poem. Padraig, I wonder if poetry is the window through which the other you is shouting. But if that’s the case, then the word is still muffled maybe?
I want to share my own poem about thankfulness - sort of…
This morning I knelt
down in the wet grass
and gave thanks,
unsure for what
and certain
there is no who.
Is there a way
to wash me clean
of all my past
transgressions,
to show me what
the days have been,
might be, are?
That’s the thing
about gratitude -
it’s often rearward-looking -
while the dewy grass
and cold air beckon
saying - look you
to the ripening sky
that’s becoming
all we need.
Initially misread the end as “that’s all the becoming we need” which I also like! :)
It seems counter-cultural and risky to say, but gratitude for my daughter has been hard-won.
She's always been a great kid, and I've always been grateful for her - but there is an ambivalence there also (in the sense you've mentioned). My wife had a traumatic birth and suffered with postnatal depression and PTSD. I then suffered with my own mental health issues once my wife had recovered. There were times when gratitude was the last thing on the agenda!
Five years in, and we're mostly there now, but the light is definitely contrasted with plenty of grey - and we're at a place now that we're able to look back at both with gratitude.
I have hard-earned gratitude for my turbulent childhood and my parents. It's not an easy thing to grow up with an erratic, strongly bipolar father who was in and out of mental institutions and a mother with frail health and waning energy. As a young teen, I wanted to be erased from this planet. But over time I became grateful for both my parents who I realized were trying their very best and never without love for each other and us kids. And most difficult - I came to a place of gratitude for growing up in that situation. I developed a strong core of resilience and a deep, abiding respect and empathy for those who struggle with mental health. It has influenced everything from my career path to the way I find beautiful things to value in this imperfect world.
That's a fabulous poem about your other self, Pádraig. It encapsulates for me the life's process of at once Becoming and Unselfing. I'm on a humbling journey of cancer, remission and ongoing, precarious medical monitoring. I'm learning gratitude, very late in my life, for my own body. How strong it has proven itself to be, how deep are its reserves of energy and wisdom. I now listen more carefully to it, and I'm learning many surprising things from it.
I have heard people express gratitude for their cancer, something I can never ever feel. But I can feel grateful for the lessons it has taught me and continues to teach me about resilience, how to ask for help, forgiveness, humility, and acceptance of my new body with its scars and limitations. Most of all the gratitude that I am still here.
Jennifer, I agree about cancer not being a blessing. But it did lead to my writing a book of poetry about my mother‘s breast cancer and my own called Given Time: a mother daughter cancer memoir. When I read out loud from the book, I’m able to capture both my love and my grief for my mother‘s death. That wouldn’t have happened without the book or without my cancer diagnosis.
That’s an amazing gift even if very painful. I admire your resilience
I am grateful that I can be myself. It is hard-won because we all are different and feel ouselves to be different. And to me it long seemed there are more people different in the same way, not mine. It took some time to find those that are different in my way. To whom I am not too much, but energetic, not scary, but funny, not too weird (because they are too), not too strong (because they see it for the weakness it is). I am truly grateful they have given me back my selfcompassion.
I am thankful for you, Mr Ó Tuama. You are a beautiful human being, and by sharing yourself you help others become as human as they can be, more than you will ever know. So thank you for being you, and for being so generous with yourself and those who come in contact with you. It means more than you think. Thank you, thank you, thank you for the poetry you reveal and bring into the world :)
My first marriage was over a decade of living with a very broken, unhappy person who preferred to maintain his identity as a victim of the wounds he knew rather than open himself up to the possibility of healing. When I finally physically left that abusive relationship, I then had to endure another decade of co-parenting two young men with this difficult, wounded person - trying to always provide a safe space for them when not with their father. At times it was so painful dealing with their father's verbal & psychological abuse that there were moments I contemplated dropping out of their lives just so that I would no longer have to deal with their father & the accumulation of legal bills in dealing with his contentiousness in trying to protect them. However, I stayed the course, & as my sons are both now adults & are making similar decisions about distancing them from the toxicity of their father, I am grateful that I did not give up on maintaining my relationships with them - that I am still generally welcomed into their lives as they are navigating into adulthood.
That tough decision of whether to stay or leave the closest of family in order to thrive in one's own life is so personal, so fraught. Im so glad your decision paid off with layers of rich rewards.
This is a common topic for conversation with me. I suffered from mental and physical abuse as a child. Sadly and gratefully it led me to work in caring professions. I understood their stories because I'd lived similar and could therefor provide the light for a new path for them.
Each week your missives seem to reach into my mind and nudge me a litte further forward with something I'm stuck on. The line where you say "There are other things that I will never have gratitude for, because it was a terror to survive the suffering and I’m amazed I did" gave me pause. Life has served me abandonment and grief in many guises. When those I trust in my life comment on how strong I am at having coped it surprises me because I don't feel like I'm a special case. I did not dissolve after my marriage ended or spend weeks in bed after the untimely death of my mother. Yet, the stories I create in my mind about who I am in relation to these experiences cause me no end of turmoil. Because I have gone seeking, I understand that those who cannot suffer evade their pain instead of turning towards it with curiosity. Perhaps, I cannot suffer because I am too busy ruminating, to turn towards my pain, acknowledge it and let it go? My future self also whispered poetry to me which has led me here, and provided another idea for a poem. Thanks ☺️
ON THE DAY OF THANKS
“You’re wasting your breath,” they say
to the whistleblower. You can’t fight
City Hall – you don’t have the cards
and the deck is stacked against you.
“Everybody wants to be a hero,
but all the heroes are dead.”
Patrick Henry said, “Give me liberty
or give me death.” General McAuliffe said,
“Nuts.”
Winston Churchill said, “We shall
never surrender.”
What Las Vegas oddsmaker
would put a dime on Joan of Arc?
And what’s the lesson of Sisyphus?
I can hear Noah’s wife saying,
“You’re wasting your time.” But he worked
and worked and forced himself to believe
that not everything had to drown, that they
would see a rainbow after the storm, a dove
bringing an olive branch.
To live with storms,
to survive the winds of change, takes so much
sweat and so many prayers, that you
almost die of boredom from vane repetitions.
And yet you continue to tend the garden,
mark time with each sunrise and sunset –
cry out loud with each and every Injustice,
continually waiting for the answer why.
Don’t waste your time fretting over
the things you can’t change.
Even Jesus
took the lash, let someone else
carry his cross for a while.
Even the wind
has to catch its breath.
I’m thankful I just discovered how to get to the comments.
I chuckled at your comment, because I relate. There is a special delight when some small thing that baffles me suddenly resolves. It can sometimes change how I experience the whole day (or in memory, a long time). Thanks for your reminder that sometimes a small delight can awaken gratitude, too!
The story of my marriage. I was woefully unhappy as a married person. For the 20 years of my life that I was married, I was also still deeply embedded in conservative theology. Leaving was not an option. Staying was what was holy and right. So every single day, for probably 18 of those 20 years, I PRAYED. "Help", as Anne Lamont would say, was my most consistent prayer. Help me be better. Help me be loving. Help me be supportive. Help me be different, feel different, act different. And woefully unhappy I stayed. I honestly often wished I was no longer living, except that I deeply loved my children. Eventually I left both my belief-system and my marriage (within months of each other but in that order) and the next 20 years have been a journey of attempted understanding.
My ex-husband, after some years, met and married a woman with two young sons. Their father was not able to be involved in their lives. And his new wife was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer just after they met. She lived a short while (2 years perhaps) and then she passed away. Those little boys were then raised to young adulthood by my ex-husband.
I really thought God had never answered all those prayers of mine. I was so angry and felt so hopeless about belief. But I wonder now if the "help" I received was the strength to do what I needed to do to get better. To make the impossible decisions that I made. I feel, now, so much gratitude for the capacity to feel joy. And so much gratitude for whatever was redemptive on the far side of those excruciating decisions. I'm not certain I am answering the question of a hard-won gratitude, or if this is just a reframe of my story. But I know I feel deep gratitude. Here. And now. For all of this.
I am grateful for having my position eliminated after moving across the country to take it. It did get me to where I wanted to be and away from an organization whose culture was not a good match. It was a shocking unexpected way in which I was dismissed, and it rocked me to my core. However, after a few months, I found a different position that is a better match for me.