Meanwhile, the Seeds: how we see when grief is what we feel
by Barbara Hurd
Of late years, however, I have come to suspect that the mystery may just as well be solved in a carved and intricate seed case out of which the life has flown, as in the seed itself. . . .
—Loren Eiseley
1) Marsh Marigolds
Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment.
—Kurt Vonnegut
In the valley bottom just north of my Appalachian home, a trio of trails intersects. One trail encircles the hundreds of acres between two back country roads. Another crosses the creek and heads uphill, and a third skirts a swath of boggy ground where six weeks ago dozens of marsh marigolds bloomed like small suns in the new green of spring. I have traipsed these acres for more than thirty years, but six days after the hearse pulled away from our house, I headed for that bog again and nothing was the same. The solitary maple was there where it should be. Likewise the clumps of rhododendron across the valley, the hillsides thick with hemlock and oak. All of it was familiar and yet it seemed I’d never been there before.
It wasn’t geography that had shifted, but time. Once, the forest had a past, present, and future. There were saplings that tomorrow would be trees. There were fallen hemlocks that yesterday had towered. Once, I gave each trail a name: Perimeter Trail, Ravine Trail, Guillotine Trail, Creek Path, Ridge, and Vernal Pool Spur. Now the place had only the present where all big-leafy, shade-making green things had stalled, and I became a word-loving widow walking into territory where words felt as false as any heavenly hereafter.
Part way to the valley bottom, one of the trails cuts through a stand of old hemlocks. One large hemlock splintered years ago, its falling interrupted by a grid of surrounding branches. Ever since, it has loomed, hung up, ten feet over the trail. Years ago, I named it the guillotine tree, and most days when I walked quickly beneath it, I felt both reminder and relief.
On that day, I paused because if time has stopped—his time, my time, the forest’s time—then how can fate be tempted?
In my pocket was a pack of seeds the funeral director had given me when he delivered the ashes. The accompanying note said something about hope but nothing about what kind of seeds those were or where they should be planted. What about sun? What about shade? What kind of digging does the future require? How about the dead? Doesn’t a garden imply a subsequent season?
A seed is about what’s next—a small object flung into or buried in the tenuous tomorrow, which doesn’t exist, not for the one who asks only about the size of the hole a widow can learn to live with.
When did his waning accelerate? March? April? In the house, he began to take up less space. He moved among three rooms, then two, and then he didn’t move. Out in the woods the forest floor greened up with violets and spring beauties. The trails my dog Lexi and I walked on cut like soft ribbons through it all.
Once, years ago, I told him that I often felt small in spring, so much else along the trails in the business of growth, profusion, the incessant reaching for light and a pollinator’s tongue. I like those ratios, and I like them to change: my turn to be this. Your turn to be that. Isn’t that what it means, in part, to love the world we live in? To know ourselves as miniscule other and then as a crucial part of the grand and glittering whole?
I don’t remember what he said, but I can imagine he smiled and quoted one of his own lines: The world—try to look at it / coldly, see behind its glamor / and gloom.
Outside the bedroom window the rhododendron buds swelled. Inside, his slow fading had nothing to do with fairness or whose turn it was for anything. The future was approaching fast and final, shrinking to pinhole size and just about to close.
Loren Eiseley says, “Each of us goes home before his death.” But the truer claim might be this: every widow goes home after he’s gone. With Lexi bounding behind me, I wandered off Perimeter Trail and into the bog at whose muddy edge the marsh marigolds, so full of color just weeks ago, were going to seed. Their name, Caltha palustris, means chalice + marsh, but there was no grail there that day, no goblet holding anything holy. Finished with blooming, each plant had produced eight or nine pods which, just past the stage of fleshy green, splayed out from a tired-looking center. Over the next few weeks those pods should dry, and the swelling inside should split each one in two.
But there too the future felt over, and those seeds, it seemed, might dangle there, like paralyzed tentacles, un-ripened, forever.
Back in the house, the kitchen was clean, the bills were paid, necessary calls answered, while inside my pocket the funeral director’s seeds remained in a zip-lock bag, unplanted, soil-less.
Inside my mind, it was one hole after another, no way for any plan to find footing.
Small mounds rose matted and damp; the bog cover was about to give way. The body followed the drill: one foot slopped after another until the rhythm of numbness uncoupled the mind, which could do nothing but trail helplessly behind while every inkling of story faltered without a next.
Nothing obvious happened. There were hummocks to lean into, hidden folds to clutch, plenty of places for a well-meant plan for mindful healing to vanish in the mud.
Grief is not a narrative. It’s an ecosystem pocked with pools and sinking ground, a place to learn that because certain territories are unmappable they can accommodate whatever the grieving one brings to them—a sense of stopped time, an obsession to keep walking, an inability to see that mindless moving often deepens the ruts.
2) Touch-Me-Nots
There is this cave
in the air behind my body
that nobody is going to touch:
A cloister, a silence.
—“The Jewel” James Wright
There was a body that became a cave that nobody was going to touch, not the way he did back in the years when I loved so many things: rumpled silk sheets, apricot compote, jewelweeds that grew rampant along the Guillotine Trail. I used to pick and submerge them in the creek where I could watch them shimmer under water like fistfuls of jewels.
Their juice is a salve. Their leaves are deer-delicacies.
Also called touch-me-nots, they produce fruit in late summer, less than an inch long, that resemble small pea pods sewn shut by a sloppy seamstress. When ripe, the pods respond to any touch at all.
Back in the years when I loved so many things, I loved to press a pod between my fingers and feel the vessel explode, shoot the seeds six feet away in a wild catapulting of hope. Even rain and wind can make a pod quiver enough to release what’s inside.
If you brush by them in late summer and hear the light pop and sprinkle of seeds, you know there is nothing in the natural world that can help you go back to how you felt before. Touch-me-nots want only to be touched. I didn’t. Maybe aloneness seems truer this way.
3) Blackberries
Might not it be tiresome to be stuck in one place all of one’s life?
—Janice Pariat
Once it germinates, a plant stays put. If conditions are good—sun and water and soil sufficiently rich—it sends its first shoots up right there, and then a stalk. It grows right there. For years I went to the ridge above my home to feast on August blackberries. So did the bears and warblers. We knew where to go and when, how to time our visits for plucking at peak ripeness. It was all so predictable. The canes flowered right there, bore fruit right there, went to seed, dried up, and died right there. We aimed ourselves right there and enjoyed the bounty.
Grief is nothing like that. It’s rarely right there. It slithers and slides, bulges here, recedes over there, chokes you unexpectedly. It’s pointless to expect something looming and elusive to be still, to be an oracle to approach when you’re desperate to bargain away what you feel. No deal, it says. Stay with me, it says. I am the price of loving, it says, and I am what binds you to your widowed friend in Maine, to mothers in Sudan, the Inuit on the shore where her village once stood.
But when waves of new grief miniaturize the world, your life shrinks too. For a long time, it isn’t empathy you learn. What you learn is that you yourself are a circular trail. The weeks that don’t pass are a series of Escher drawings, mazes with no exits.
Another friend, widowed two years before I was, told me she hadn’t wanted to miss any part of grieving, which partly meant, I think, she intended to pay attention to every wave of sorrow that washed over her. How admirable, I thought back then.
How impossible, I thought, after Stephen died. Buffeted, hammered, I became a choiceless she to whom, it seemed, certain things were done. If there’s anything to be gained by scrutinizing every wave of sorrow, as my friend seemed to want to do, it is in learning how grief can leave you tsunamied and adrift, a bystander between the worlds of who you were and who you might now never become.
Grief is not a matter of standing apart and sucking the marrow, as Thoreau advised. In sorrow, you don’t swallow. You are swallowed. You land in a void where nothing stays still except time, and nothing can take root which means there is no way to uproot what you think you’ve had enough of.
Victor Hugo says, “A piece of Chinese silk shows a shark eating a crocodile eating an eagle eating a swallow eating a caterpillar.”
You are that caterpillar and you’ve lost all your legs.
Sometimes grief is just like that.
Those blackberries I once feasted on attract the spotted-wing drosophilia, which buries its eggs under the fruit’s soft skin. The fruit is an aggregate, each berry made up of small drupelets. Next spring, inside the dead canes, the caterpillar of the concealer moth will feed on leftovers.
Grief is like that too. It enters the body and travels. It churns in the stomach, shivers the nerves, fires up fevers and carries you at first to places you have no wish to be. Once, not long ago in an ordinary market, I pushed a cart past a shelf of homemade goods and burst into tears because he loved apple pie with ice cream.
Making decisions became impossible. Whether to pack up the car and head to family near Boston, continue teaching, chop down a few trees that threatened the driveway, take Lexi for a walk around a nearby lake. Turn left or right at the trailhead. To look around was to see a landscape that used to be full of possibilities, alternative paths that disappeared after he died, leaving a jumble of arrows pointing in opposite directions while path became mere smithereened metaphor. I shrugged my shoulders a lot. I don’t know; it doesn’t matter, I said a lot. I said not now a lot because saying anything else seemed like too much work and yes implied a future I no longer had.
Months after he died, an early storm iced up the woods and it seemed in that wintery landscape that the distance between then and now might expand so widely that grief would have room to form and re-form over and over again, without reason or redemption and so run itself thin, exhaust itself into dissipation, and finally dissolve.
Maybe then, I thought, this sorrow will unstiffen.
Maybe then I will know better how to miss him.
Or perhaps I wasn’t thinking anything at all that day until I found myself on the trail that skirts the edge of the field where a few unexpected berry-canes had slumped in the snow. Most blackberries spread by underground runners. But the familiar ridge and its big berry patch were a half-mile away, too far for runners to have traveled to that valley and pushed up an isolated clump of thorny stems.
Perhaps the question that began to form had little to do with sweetness or death and more to do with movement, how anything wingless, footless, finless could get from somewhere else to here.
Loss, gone, dead. It’s never abstractions that consume the mourner; it’s all the morseled reminders: the sight of the martini shaker shoved to the back of the cabinet, the unopened jar of olives, a shopping list in a forgotten pocket to which he’d added, “apple pie.”
How does what’s been swallowed ever get out and move again?
From inside the pathless interior of a giant fish, Jonah makes vows to a Lord who listens and releases him because he promises that from here on out, he’ll behave much better.
Even if I knew what kind of release I wanted (from loving him? from missing him?), what kind of promise could I possibly make from inside this dark and groundless place?
With a bit of moisture and warmth, most seed cases soften so the seed can sprout. But a blackberry seed is hard and tight, almost uncrackable. In the garden, it needs the gardener’s razor blade or nail clippers to nick the tough coat, prepare it for planting.
Out in the wild, though, no razor blades or clippers, just the beak-rip by bird, a warbler, perhaps, who swallows the fruit whole. Each of the berry’s drupelets holds a single seed whose only chance to have a future is to be passed into the bird’s gizzard where it will be rolled around, mashed against gravel the bird has swallowed and stored, and finally excreted, a little softer now, a little damaged, its hard coating slightly etched and thus with a better shot at germination. Botanists have named that gizzard-nicking process; they call it scarification.
In that winter storm I pricked my skin on the barbs of last year’s berry canes and remembered a day a few Augusts ago when I came back from the woods with a small bucket of the dark and juicy fruits. I didn’t know their history then, how they spread, which parts survive a winter and which parts die. I didn’t know how quickly the future was about to arrive or what it meant to be scarified. I knew only that we sat on the deck that day, and we ate them, you and I, those moments of sweetness, one at a time, and I thought about our bodies, so tender and doomed, and I put your stained fingers in my mouth.
4) Samaras
The detail is, by definition, incomplete and always points away from itself.
—Jennifer Raab
I spent much of that first autumn wandering in the woods, flattened by the illusion that the world had blurred over and left me no reason to try to distinguish among the nuances of grief. It’s what part of us does in the face of death: reduce the aftermath to black and white. Thinking like that (is that even thinking?) takes less energy. Now that he was gone, then gone, too, were the delicate sways of missing vs. sorrow, the intricacies of imminent vs. tangled losses. My mind felt monosyllabic, stuck in single-minded ruts and not much else. Because I couldn’t make fine distinctions, I couldn’t see them, either. The world was suddenly blunt and basic, reduced to the ultimate binary: I am alive, and he is not.
He and I often worked in opposite ways. For him, a poem begins when the poet mistrusts words . . . makes them pass hard tests. For me, an essay starts with things. He fleshed out the poem with particulars. I trace the specifics to underlying ideas.
I don’t know whether our ways of getting at something meaningful follow us into grief. If I had died first, maybe his mourning would have taken the form of notes on love’s contradictions and the many shades of cherishing. But I didn’t; he did, and after months of a too starkly simple mind, I tried re-anchoring myself to the grit of grainy details, which used to launch my imagination.
And so it was on one of those autumn days, I brought home from a walk a cluster of maple samaras and placed it on a white sheet of paper on my study desk. A samara is the indehiscent fruit of a maple, though kids know it better as the helicopter they delight in throwing into the air so they can watch its whirligigging descent in early autumn. Samaras are a maple’s way of dispersing its seeds, of making sure they stay aloft for a bit and can thus be carried on small breezes beyond the mature tree’s shade.
Needing something (anything?) to engage with, I aimed to see what sustained attention to a single object might do to a mind stuck in the single fact of death. The samara sat in the middle of a cleared vacant space, well-lit by the desk lamp. In a closed room, I bent over it for hours with a magnifying glass and forgot all about that branch I’d tugged it from, the canopy of red-turning maples above the ferns and forest floor dotted with the ivory caps of mushrooms, the rotting logs and wormy tunnels, the hundreds of critters who call that little slice of the forest home.
Instead, I focused on the detail on the desk and on a detail in a Levon Biss photograph of a samara. In both, the small lines dip from wingtips across vein-etched, withery skin. In both, those lines look topographic, a watershed with a series of small streams curving along the straight edge of the wing and rushing toward the place where they join. In both, the color is bronze, deepening toward copper. At the bottom, held tight to the stem, lies that telltale darker double-spot: “A beautiful thin sack,” Thoreau says, “woven around the seed.” No, I thought, a shroud.
The samara on the desk was not a photo, nor a detail from a photo, but perhaps I hoped that close attention to it would reveal something new.
It did nothing of the sort. I didn’t feel time open into a lyric moment. Instead, time collapsed even more. I fell further out of myself and into isolation. By severing the seedpod from the maple, I’d removed a detail from its context. I’d pulled it from its woven place, banished its story, scale, coherence, connections, the softness of damp ground and smell of fallen leaves and set it on a piece of plain white paper under artificial lights.
I did it with his face, too. From the hundreds of images I have in memory and photos—ones of him smiling, frowning, studying a poem or listening to music, howling with laughter—I detached one image and used it to replace all others: his face as he lay dying, still and pale, sinking into itself, turned sharply over his right shoulder, eyes closed, mouth open and speechless.
As Monet painted his wife on her deathbed, it was, he said, her face that drew him: . . . the sequence of changing colours that death was imposing on her rigid face. Blue, yellow, grey. In the painting, her lips are slightly parted. She seems to recede into, be enveloped by bed covers and shroud.
Mere obsession can’t do what a painter can; Monet’s art transformed Camille’s death and maybe his own grief, but I had no way of surrounding Stephen’s face with anything like a soft blue blanket, no way to paint the memory with tenderness.
Instead, I committed the sin of synecdoche: the detail became the whole. Determined to look his death square in the face, I blew that image up big and installed it like a stern reminder at the front of my mind, a death mask lashed below the bowsprit that was me as I made my way through the ensuing months. In its wake, the whole milieu in which he’d lived for more than eighty years grew thin and wispy, shoved aside by the growing force of that singular image that remained: his face that final week, which became the detail that held me. And then I captioned that face with four lines excerpted from a poem he’d written years ago that he’d be—
pleased to have the face
that here and there
disturbs, the hint of a mask
slightly ripped, beneath it a stone.
And there it was: his fierce insistence on reality first, memories later.
The word context comes from Middle English: to join by weaving, to plait. The word detail comes from French: to cut into pieces. What happens when you remove a detail from its context and then cut it into even smaller bits? Though it’s true that even an isolated detail invites description—here are those thin lines, the fading color, the flatness of cooling tissue over which I obsessed, as if with a magnifying glass—it’s also true that such a disconnected detail resists narration beyond itself. Removed from its context, there’s just this object with no link to or suggestion of any larger story elsewhere.
Imagine the upside-down, drowning boy in Breughel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus without the surrounding village. Or imagine Auden’s poem about that painting if either artist had mused only on those wildly thrashing legs. Isn’t the power of a photo—of a polar bear, say, stranded on an ice floe—lessened if there’s no background weight of shrinking habitat? Imagine a face detached from everything that made it, something stuck, an increasingly inadequate version of its previous self and thus more and more unfamiliar, stark and isolated.
I wish I could have warned myself sooner: any grasping a piece of what’s gone obliterates the larger memory, which means the isolated detail can become whatever you think you need. Eventually, the samara on the desk shriveled to an inert bit of botanical tissue poised for autopsy, a wizened thing that I could use to puncture Thoreau’s cheery I have great faith in a seed . . .I am prepared to expect wonders.
The face became something specific to hang on to, horrific but constant. When the emptiness became too much, I imagined holding it in my hands, locking my fingers under the skull, willing it to be a touchstone, a totem, anything to keep me from being washed away.
But taken too far, looking and looking became not a way into landscape, as it used to be, but an imposition of my own need to bind myself to the harshness of loss. I took the seed, the face, and dwindled them down to futureless tokens of grief until I could no longer see what they were. Both became less and less themselves, while every walk in the woods became a walk through a hall of mirrors where there was no escaping the long face that was mine, the dead face that was his, which I imagined stroking again. I knew he wouldn’t mind, knew he’d say, “Do with it what you will. Take what you need.”
This is not what you need, I wish I could have told myself sooner. This is the “single vision” Blake warns about, the imposition of self upon the world, which only amps up loneliness, isolates not just the detail but also the person clinging to it.
Once, late that first summer, a few monarch butterflies flitted around the phlox in my backyard garden. I sat and watched them for a long time. They lingered and lingered, and so did I. A friend said maybe one of them carried a message from Stephen.
Near the end of her life, Rachel Carson wrote a letter to a friend about the monarchs they’d watched that morning: “when any living thing has come to the end of its life cycle we accept that end as natural . . .That is what those brightly fluttering bits of life taught me this morning.”
Miles away and a few weeks later, her friend, watching monarchs in Maine, wrote in response, “I am so grateful to the Butterflies for bringing me the precious thoughts you captured so tangibly.”
Monarch as teacher? As messenger? I don’t believe in signs, but I latched anyway on to the wild what ifs and watched those butterflies for hours, not for their beauty or the intricacies of feeding on phlox but for some message that one of them—which one, that one?—might be winging to me.
Shall I sit still with a lap full of blooms?
Shall I break out the butterfly net?
I watched myself do it, watched the what ifs erode what I’d considered my mind.
I might have neglected the weeding, the unmown lawn, the possibility of a fox in the nearby field. Anticipating the one monarch that might leave the flock and flit toward me with a message, I might have lost sight of everything else.
That’s the danger, too, when clinging to a detail shifts from consolation to confinement, when you are too held for too long, when looking and looking transforms neither object nor see-er but leaves you stranded in the looking.
It took me months and months to feel—bodily, viscerally—that an image ripped from its context can never substitute for the moving, breathing world, that a detail is, by definition, incomplete and always points away from itself.
If you’re thoughtful or attentive, perhaps the pointing is back towards the picture as a whole. The isolated and isolating image somehow untethers itself from your grip and reinserts itself into the larger context from which it had been excised and without which transformation doesn’t have a chance.
Who knows how this re-absorption happens—if it ever does. Or how the bigger picture comes back slowly into focus. When Brueghel’s upturned legs are seen beside a ploughman and some sheep, the poem provides a meditation about witness to suffering. If a polar bear’s isolated floe is set against the panorama of melting ice and rising seas, the image insists on the bigger story. Beyond the turtle eggs, a warming ocean implicates us all.
And, mercifully, beyond those four plucked lines, the rest of Stephen’s poem about a face asserts itself. This is the ending:
beneath it a stone
that would be happy to bleed
in the right hands.
Lines that reminded me that reabsorption is not a matter of will, of flexing power or nimbly leaping over limitations. It feels something more akin to letting absence soak through the skin, lying down for a while with all that has gone, a willingness to try to become the “right hands,” cupped hands, into which a loved one can bleed.
5) Seed Cases
But now she felt, with an almost primordial knowledge,
that the first garden must have been a grave.
—Anne Michaels The Winter Vault
Double-wrapping a scarf around my neck one autumn day eighteen months after you died, I turn down Creek Path and head for the water into which Lexi bounds. All around me, the woods have grown quieter. The acorns have dropped, ferns gone bronze; autumn has stripped, as autumn does, the landscape clean of green, leaving the forest unadorned and cold.
On my desk back home, not far from that decaying samara, lies Ed Yong’s An Immense World and some incontrovertible facts:
Bottlenose dolphins and owls hear better than I do.
Sharks can detect faint electric fields. Bats echolocate.
The wedge-tailed eagle can detect a rat a mile away.
Lexi smells a hundred times more scents on the trail than I do.
I have no layer of fur as a dog does and no way to avoid An Immense World’s hard truth: without technologies, we humans stumble around, unaware of electric fields, magnetic fields, and ultrasonic sound. Much of the world hums and buzzes, slithers, explodes, and stings outside of our senses’ ability to register.
Infuse the body with grief and those sensory limits shrivel the world even more.
Sitting by the creek, I watch the current race around corners and slow in the straightaways and remember a time—long before I met you—when this little valley was underwater. Beavers had moved in; remnants of their dams are still evident in the esker-like rise that winds along the west side of the clearing. They’ve been gone for years but there, clearly visible among everything that now bristles and sways, are the contours of their absence.
What better place, I think today, to get down to the elemental, to practice what’s implied by Thoreau’s claim that The very earth is a granary and a seminary, to know the ground as the place to fuse nourishment and prayer, to know any future garden-feast must contain its own death and that such a paradox enlarges the world.
Mourning, after all, is not just about a single him, her, or them but often about whole communities, the displaced, the marginalized, and not just humans but whole other species—orchids in Bangladesh, the French praying mantis, twenty-two frog species, the Lord Howe long-eared bat and then habitats, islands, entire ways of life. Can such losses be too large to acknowledge? If so and if grief sometimes numbs us without our knowing, does it infiltrate our dark recesses anyway, proceed to do what I’ve learned grief does: isolate the image, obliterate the bigger story, unravel the woven? What kind of attentiveness would help us locate the source of large sadnesses we’re not even sure we feel?
Like ticks who can sense only what they need—body heat, hair, the smell of our flesh—we, if we’re stricken by global griefs we don’t even know we’re carrying, might likewise be capable of sensing only what insures our immediate survival. A tick, after all, doesn’t willfully ignore what surrounds it—blackberry blossoms, trillium, carpets of emerald moss. It’s just that beyond its basic needs, it has no way of even knowing what else is out there.
Grief can clip our antennae, cloud our vision, deaden the skin’s response to stimuli. Imagination atrophies. Creativity stiffens. Never mind the 7th generation, the pleas for thinking like a global community, the plight of people beyond our immediate circle.
If I need water today, shelter today, food today, I’m aware of little else.
For months I’ve walked and walked until it seems that pure physical movement has finally jostled the tight cocoon of grief and reminded me at last that the body’s senses are a terrible thing to waste. Along Creek Path, the oaks today seem more yellow, the maples more red. The pokeweed stems above the collapsing undergrowth are deepening into purple as they die. When Lexi races through them, she emerges with her white fur stained with a bluish hue that will linger for days. Tonight, she will curl next to me as I lie beneath the covers, right hand rubbing her belly, left hand resting on your un-mussed side of the bed.
Back in my study, I’ve begun again to read your other poems and to hear you—as if alive once more—in the nuances and tonal shifts, subtle insights into life and death and all the in-betweens:
. . . trying to live
beyond despair, he believes, he needs
to believe
everything he does takes root, hums
beneath the surfaces of the world.
It’s too late for the samara on my desk. When I removed it from the tree, I canceled its future. Where the seeds had been, the color has darkened. Unlike many seed cases, the samara in the wild never swells and splits wide open. The ripened seeds inside do not burst free. Instead, out there in the woods, once the breeze-blown samara settles lightly on the ground, its wings begin to thin, become invisible. Nothing obvious happens. The seeds, held inside for months, can only be released after the membrane that confines them finally decomposes.
And so it is that among all the decay that is autumn’s persistent reminder, your dying face—the one I’d fixated on for more than a year—has started to shed the mask I’d imposed. Those eyebrows with their history of lifting in amusement are re-emerging. In the lines around your eyes, I can see again so much laughter and doubt, so many decades of work and love, that frozen face finally becoming just one face among many you’d had, attached to the many stories you’d told and to the body that could give so much pleasure. And now here is your voice, re-emerging at last, to override the ragged breathing of your end and to offer me this: recite the list / of what you’ve learned to do without. / It is stronger than prayer.
What might also be true is an opposite prayer, a here-and-now list of what I’m growing grateful for again: connection to larger worlds of troubles and good work; immersion in the exuberant mayhem of falling leaves and collapsing stalks, creek eddies and mud; intimacies of all kinds, including ours, my love, which is re-shaping itself now to sustain my time alone.
I don’t know if we ever outgrow grief. Or should. Part of me hopes not, or hopes that at least we might emerge from it slightly scarified and therefore a bit more opened. Meanwhile, the seed pods along Creek Path lie full and ready, their futures tight inside, a thousand tomorrows about to drop to the ground and try to take root.