3 posts tagged “death”

Forty one years ago today my mother died. March 12, 1967. She was forty-five. I was nine. Not a day goes by that I don't think of her for one reason or another. Today I can't help but think of the fact that I am five years older now than she was when she died. I know that my brothers and sister think of her as well, and that this date is remembered by them too. She was the sun that warmed us. And I can't help thinking that, had she lived a while longer, my life might have been different in a million little ways.

Our relationships with the dead continue to change over years, I've come to believe. At different stages of life we begin to understand things that we couldn't possibly have before we had certain experiences or knowledge of certain things. We forgive, we accept, we grow. But we do not forget. The memories can be cherished without being idealized.

Sisters- Mom, Dorty, Lois, Joan

Grace June graduates

Me, Mom and Joyce (left to right)

Jazz Pianist Oscar Peterson is reported to have died Sunday at his home outside Toronto, with his family present.

His spirit, fingers, and talent will be missed. Jazzhouse.org will probably have an obit posted in the next day or so in "The Last Post."

"A jazz player is an instant composer," Peterson once said in a CBC interview, while conceding jazz did not have the mass appeal of other musical genres. "You have to think about it, it's an intellectual form," he said."

Show us what inspires you to write.

It would be difficult to actually show what inspires me to write, because the themes that inspire me to write are usually along the lines of loss, death, memories... The opening lines of a song I have never quite completed go like this:

     "Must I tell you of the spaces you leave,

      whenever you go?

      The holiness of empty places

      is all we seem to know..."

I am also inspired by music, art, other peoples photographs. Several years ago in New York, I was editing the collection of photographer Tony Vaccaro, who had done a great session with Jackson Pollock, portraits of him painting, talking, etc. And sometime later, I sat down at my computer with the memory of the photos and wrote what is probably the shortest poem ever, simply entitled "Jackson Pollock."

     "Jackson, Jackson.

      It was always

      in your eyes."

Another poem I wrote years ago was entitled "Honor," and in a way it speaks to me now of several relationships, not just the one it was actually written about.

"And I honored you with silence

all these years

While you led your life

somewhere else, and I knew

that you were living

You were living in other people's lives

and still in mine, but I was the museum

that housed you

in silence."

     And another, unfinished, poem that I started several years ago, with my sister in mind, starts like this:

"We rose by something like

God's grace

from the wreckage of our childhood

After years spent kneeling

before the holy altar of grief..."

and another part goes like this:

"You call me

the keeper of our childhood memories

The place where your memory

ends and begins again

is fluid

And I never know

at what point you will meet me

but I know that you will

eventually meet me"

Maybe someday I'll actually finish that one.