My brother has lost his wife. He didn’t misplace her at the mall nor are they engaged in an elaborate game of hide-n-seek. She has gone ahead, leaving him uncertain as to how to be in this world without her. Many of you know this space, have felt the crippling blow of grief and loss and its forever permanence, changing how you greet the day and bid it goodnight.
I read somewhere years ago, and I cannot give credit to the hand that wrote these words, but … “Grief is the beautiful burden of having loved another more than yourself.” Not all can lay claim to that burden. Certainly, if we have had a child, have had a precious friend whom we were granted privilege to carry when they were too weak to go forward on their own, but not all partnerships fall into the category of “more than oneself.” My brother was one of the lucky ones.
And the other day I came upon a poem written by Barbara Ras, an American poet born in Massachusetts in 1949, the same year as my brother, which means absolutely nothing, but I find the parallel in such details something to cling to while I offer him support. “You Can’t Have It All” was one poem in Ras’s collection entitled Bite Every Sorrow first published in 1998 and… it got me thinking.
Bite Every Sorrow was Barbara Ras’s first collection of poetry, published by Louisiana State University, and won her the Walt Whitman Award. Such a poignant title, which conjures up images of courage and perseverance and tenacity, knowing that life is going to hurl painful experiences at us. Such moments are unavoidable and one of the few guarantees that life offers us, along with our inevitable end. I picture a warrior, whose armour is the wisdom that life is messy but oh my there is such beauty if we pay attention.
Ras tells us you can’t have it all, but you can have the “touch of a single eleven-year-old finger on your cheek, waking you to say the hamster is back,” the “purr of the cat,” “speak a foreign language, sometimes, and have it mean something,” “your grandfather sitting on the side of your bed, at least for a while.” Her list is ample and profound.
It seems so easy to run through the inventory of what we cannot have, when it is too late to reverse the tide. Whenever my children came home from school with their shoulders up and their eyes down, ready to recite the day’s shortcomings, I asked first what went right about the day, what made them giggle spontaneously or feel the power of knowing. By the time they had searched their minds for those special moments, they forgot for the most part that which fell short. I try to practice that simple tactic.
We can all fill pages with those tiny brief barely noticeable moments that we carry along with us as a touchstone, as evidence we once were children, we were once almost perfect, we were once in love, we were once safe. I try, though not always successfully, to find my own list when I think I’m doing without. It’s an easy therapy with a quicker solution and I release them in no particular order, just letting the moments fall from my memory at will – Linden sliding his little arms under sleeping me on Christmas morning, whispering, “Grandma, it’s Christmas.” Cycling between two banks of ground flush with sweet peas, almost overcoming me with their intoxicating scent. Three-year-old Thea standing tall in the bathtub covered in bubbles, her right arm raised as she recited a movie line fromClueless,meant as a metaphor for immigration, “And nowhere does it say RSVP on the Statue of Liberty.” The smell of newborn puppies. The way my hand could fit completely inside my dad’s hand, lost there and completely safe. The smell of Annie’s kitchen with her freshly brewed coffee. Nassau’s soft velvet nose against my cheek assuring me all will be well. The perfectly skipped stone, breaking my record of eight skips, a record that still stands. The first dandelion in spring. Laughter from my four daughters drifting in the open window like a breeze while I fold clean laundry.
Ras closes her poem with, “There is the voice you can still summon at will, like your mother’s, it will always whisper, you can’t have it all, but there is this.” I implore you to make your list, to carry it around with you daily, easily accessible from a pocket in your heart, to champion your one life. “But there is this,” will soften every single want which you cannot have, even the ones that say you cannot live without. I guarantee it.
wendistewart@live.ca
