Category Archives: Rebuilding Your Life after Loss

The Power of Grief

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Grief has such enormous power that it is a shame to waste its energy.  If that energy can be channeled into a positive result, we finally have some victory over death. ––Judy Dykstra-Brown

This quote (I am quoting myself, what ego!) is opposite the title page of the book I wrote with Tony.  This is the book I celebrated having finished a week or so ago; but alas, I find the editing job goes on and on.  Just to be anal, we again had the printer print up a book and gave it to our most perfectionist friend, Sheila, who agreed to read it one last time.  She had done so before and found so many errors that we’d had to redo the pdf.  This time, we were sure, it would be perfect; but we had to check.  Well, we were wrong about the perfect part but right to check.  She still found 50 errors–mainly in the references and in the use of hyphens.  Who cares about such things?  We do.  And Sheila does.  So––most of yesterday and the day before, I rechecked the errors, made lists, shared them with Tony and Allenda, his wife, and we all checked and rechecked.  The result, somewhere around midnight last night, we had a perfect, we hope, 117th version of the book. It went off to the printer today.  if he again does a trial copy (it will be the ninth if he does) we will page through it quickly, looking for obvious flaws, and say “push the button” and this breech birth will finally be consummated. Then we get to celebrate again.  I’m afraid the earlier celebrations were all false labor.  Please put positive energy out into the air, willing this one to actually produce a child.

“Web of Night” April 2 Post

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I’m participating in this program where I’ve taken an oath to write a poem a day.  Here is today’s poem!  I need a website to link to their website, so I’m using the only one I have–this one.  By the end of the month, there will be 30 poems here…

 

Web of Night

We have been talking online for hours
and, as usual, lost track of time.
Now, after his good-bye,
it would be easier to go to bed
than to act on his reminder
that there should be hot water
in my hot tub tonight,
pumped in earlier from the volcanic depths,
left to cool all day.

I am living in sub-tropical Mexico
where things like volcanoes are everyday things.
I drink the volcano.
I swim and soak in it.
I absorb its heat,
draw from its power,
grow stronger.

This is the fountain of youth, I’ve often said.
Too long away from it, I start to grow creaky and old––
reversing those effects only by coming home again
to lie in its steaming bath.

I look up from it now
at a night sky unlike any other––
only the major stars distinct, like light seen through
irregularly perforated steel. The stars standing out individually,
between them the remarkable floss of clouds stretched
sparse as angel hair on a Christmas tree
to reveal the ornaments
between.

No one else awake in this morning hour
so early that it is really still the night before.

2 AM. Neither a dog’s bark nor a burro’s bray.
No harsh staccato though the cool night air
of air brakes of trucks
too wide for the two-lane carretera.
down below.

Alone in my world.

The clouds, while I’ve been thinking blind,
have obscured the stars
behind a thicker web of cotton wool.

I think of love so far away,
wishing it nearer but feeling it close
as the keyboard in the room behind me.
There are many of us
caught in this Web of internet romance.
Here we need not fear
the loss of a love
that is a part of an addiction
to the mystery of absence
yet words so close
they are almost
but not quite
touch.