Posts Tagged ‘loss’
Miscarriage
August 15, 2017
One of the first official symptoms of pregnancy is an out of character desire to work story problems. If Eve is forty-one when she discovers she is pregnant, how old will she be at the infant’s birth, and when baby starts kindergarten, and when baby leaves for college? If Eve is sixty when youngest child…
Read MoreOur Lady of Czestochowa
August 1, 2017
Before a metastasizing cancer had fully whittled away her quality of life, my mother left me, on a cold November morning. I found her slumped over the bathtub in my New Hampshire home, just steps away from the guest room where she often slept. I did not rush to her rescue, or to move her…
Read MoreThe Beautiful Boy
July 13, 2017
It’s barely even summer and already, in our house it is the Summer of the Guys. Our son is thirteen now, and in the last few months, the world has opened to him: he and his two best neighborhood friends start planning the day almost as soon as it has started. Freed to stay at…
Read MorePoetry Friday: “June Prayer”
June 2, 2017
How to pray for someone bent over by grief when nature is stretching upward in the June sunshine? This is the question posed by Robert Cording’s “June Prayer.” We learn in the course of the poem that the young son of a woman “I love” has died months ago, and that she asks the poet…
Read MorePreaching the End of the World
May 30, 2017
For my husband, Brian Jarboe I learned the news that guitarist Chris Cornell’s death had been declared a suicide on Thursday, May 18—which also happened to be the fourth day in a row I had not managed to get over to the pharmacy to pick up my antidepressant prescription. Which meant that I had not…
Read MorePoetry Friday: “Sewing Box”
April 21, 2017
We don’t think enough—or at least I don’t—about how objects can contain memory. But Murray Bodo’s poem “Sewing Box” shows us how: in this box in which memory is literally contained. Each of the four stanzas takes us deeper into the box. At first it’s just “the busy / sewing box I’d organize on visits…
Read MoreMuddy River
April 6, 2017
It was the summer of Leiby Kletzy, the eight-year-old Hasidic boy kidnapped from his Brooklyn neighborhood in broad daylight and brutally murdered. It was also the summer I almost lost my seven-year-old daughter Camille on a Toronto subway platform. When I turned, from inside the train, to see my daughter—outside, standing alone—my feet became bricks…
Read MoreMysteries Sherlock Holmes Can’t Solve
March 28, 2017
“No, you should definitely major in English,” I told our babysitter, a high-school senior from our church who is considering an English or Communications degree. “Fiction is just like faith,” I said, “it’s its own kind of knowledge that makes our lives richer.” I really believe that, though I have to renew my conviction from…
Read MoreThe Landscape of Grief
March 22, 2017
Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape. —C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed I drag my three children outside for a walk. They are too young to understand how desperately I need to take advantage of the warm weather even if it’s a landscape of…
Read MorePoetry Friday: “Grief Daybook: A Love Supreme”
March 10, 2017
It’s fairly common for a poem to be inspired by (or be in conversation with) a famous painting. Less often, though, do we find poems engaging with a musical work. Yet that’s just what happens in Carol Davis’s poem “Grief Daybook: A Love Supreme.” Fans of the brilliant jazz saxophonist and composer John Coltrane will…
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