Today I picked the last of the peaches
from the little tree in the front yard.
While the neighbors drive up to lawns, shrubs and vines,
peaches and apricots and artichokes and
thousands of daisies
waving in the breeze with open, cheerful faces
greet us upon our arrival. They sing and shout,
“Hello! Welcome home! Welcome home!”

Today John tills the remnants of May’s daisies,
preparing the soil for our next great experiment.
Maybe summer squash and tomato and basil.
Maybe an English garden of
bachelor buttons and poppies.
And while he tills
I pick the last of the peaches,
holding each fuzzy, red orb in my fingers
and gently nudging the stem with my thumb.
One by one each settles softly into my palm,
All but three who cling to their branch,
and to whom I give leave to feed the birds and the snails.

Today my basket overflows with sweet summer sun:
white peaches that taste to me of nectar and
that I will share with the children next door
and cook into a cobbler
and for which I thank the Earth
for my own
fresh
Food.

to Sandy with love, Suse

You are her father
And now she is lost to you.
Be good to yourself.

You will never again hear that voice or see her eyes.
Though you will turn to see her in a crowd,
It will not really be her.
The girl at a table nearby will look quite like her,
And you will sit, staring, remembering her,
Spiraling down into your thoughts,
Your love,
Your grief.
Grief, the ever-present stalker.

And you will wonder,
Why did that particular girl with the impish mouth
and the blue eyes with the heavy lashes have to sit
Right here?
Right in front of me?
So that I do not even have to turn my head to see her?
And you will smile at whomever you’re with,
even though you are far away,
And you will pretend that you have not just been turned
Inside out.

And you will hear the name Lauren
and have only one thought.
Of her.
And that she is gone from you now
And all the time you will ever have with her
You have had.
All the phone calls, the talks, the “I love yous”
You will ever have,
You have had.

And one day they will say to you,
Why do you seem so fragile today?
Aren’t you over that yet?
Does that still bother you?
And you will wonder,
Would they ask me that if I had lost a leg?
A lung?
An eye?
Are you over that cut-off leg yet?
No.
They would say,
Have you learned to walk without your leg yet?
Have you learned to breathe without that lung yet?
Have you learned to see with only one eye?

Have you learned to live this new life?

Mom and I drove downtown
through the thunderstorm.

“I’ll drop you off in front of the coffee shop.”

“No thanks, I’ll walk.
I love the weather,” she said.

And I thought of the worms,
and how, when it rained,
she would say,
“Kids! Get your raincoats on!
Where are your boots?
Go outside
and play with the worms
in the gutter!”

And we did.
There were earthworms
floating in the gutters,
flushed out of their safe holds
under the lawn
into the street.
And we squatted next to the curb
in our yellow hooded raincoats
and our rubber boots,
little kids hunting dead,
drowned worms.
We picked them out of the water,
and took them inside to Mom.
I don’t know what we did with them after that,
patted them into mud pies, I suppose.

Years later I thought
she had sent us worm hunting
to empty the house,
that small house,
of its
many children,
so she could have
a moment
of peace.

But the truth is
she just loved
the weather.
And she wanted us
to love it,
too.

It’s four in the morning,
and I’ve been awake since before midnight.
When the sun comes up,
I’ll be an executive,
but here in the dark
at the kitchen table
wrapped in a blanket
by lamplight
with a steaming mug of chamomile tea,
I am a poet
and a mother who has lost a child
and I am a daughter
remembering,
thinking,
imagining,
wondering.

I am 16.
I stand next to my mother.
She is weeping as her hands
tenderly hold,
then fold,
my sister’s bra.

The regulation-issue,
good-Catholic-girl,
1966,
white-cotton-with-the-lace-overlay,
Playtex bra in a box
from J.C. Penny.

The bra we wore under our
uniform blouses in 7th and 8th grades.
The bra we wore in high school
under the soft, wool sweaters
that we washed in the bathroom sink
squeezing them gently in the cold water
with Ivory Snow Flakes
and rinsed
and folded and rolled up in a towel,
then laid on a rack to dry over night.

The bra we wore under the blouses
that we sewed on Nani’s
hand-me-down sewing machine.
The sleeveless cotton blouses with
Peter Pan collars and
buttons we sewed on
by hand.

Then my mother
gently placed my sister’s bra in the
Goodwill bag,
as carefully as if it were a
hand-blown,
tissue-thin,
glass ball
nested there amongst the other
fragile,
but now discarded,
treasures from my sister’s
underwear drawer.

And I wanted to hold her
and let her cry on my shoulder
and sob till she had no more tears –
maybe for a hundred years –
but I did not know how.

And as I sit in the kitchen and
remember that day
I think about Frida Kahlo’s painting
of herself lying bloody in the street
after having been run over by a bus,
and how broken she became
for the rest of her life.
And I imagine myself
like that.
Broken.
No longer able to function as
previously advertised.
Never again to be whole.
And I wonder
what that will be like.

You are amazingly beautiful, my Daughter.
I don’t know that I have ever seen you so beautiful
or so happy.
It’s been a long time since I’ve seen you really smile.
I had forgotten you had dimples!
Long dimples that run up the side of your face
to Nani’s cheek bones
nestled just below sparkling blue eyes
and your Dad’s arched brows.
Blonde hair cascades from Mema’s
high forehead –
the one with the cowlick curl
that you share with your sister Wendi –
and frames your long neck to curve gently
onto the pale skin
above your breast.

So many years of grief.
The loss of love.
The death of your baby brother.
The treadmill of a seemingly aimless career.

But here,
as you lean confidently
into your love’s tall and strong body,
he, with joy in his face,
the thumb of his hand
hooked into the front pocket of his Levis,
both of you smiling at the camera
your arms holding one another’s backs
firmly, as if to say,
“I am here for you if you should fall.”
Here is a woman
in love.

“Strong woman.”
It’s usually an excuse for the way they treat us.
“Oh, he did that, because you’re a strong woman.”
Or
“Well, but you ARE a strong woman.”

Here’s the deal.
Strong women are not “strong” at all.
Not mighty
not powerful
not able to make things happen.
We simply know who we are.
That’s all.
We don’t suffer fools,
because we’ve suffered a lot worse.
We know what we want,
what we expect,
what we will tolerate,
what we choose to tolerate.

We’re not strong.
We suffer just like the fools.
We are sensitive
and easily hurt.
But we refuse to be victims.
We refuse to lay our grief
at someone else’s door step.

We only became strong
by accepting.
We accept what is.
We don’t blame others.
And we emerge
larger than we were before.
They see that as strong.
We see that as
we had no other choice.

I have wanted to tell you about him
all my life.
About his soft, moist lips,
the yellowish skin and tiny moles on his face,
and the way he narrowed his eyes
as he carefully touched
my sister’s head,
while we sat there,
side by side,
on the examination table.

I was only a baby,
maybe two or three.
They must have let me up there
to appease me.
I must have protested and
demanded,
till I was hoisted up
next to her
on the lime green
naugahide cushion of the
oak table.

I can smell the alcohol in which the
instruments were kept,
the instruments he used to
carefully unwrap the
long bandage
from ‘round her head.
I can hear the clank of the stainless steel lid
settling back onto the glass beaker.

He quieted himself.
I watched, intent on his face.
He poised his mouth,
we waited.
What would he say?
Would it please Mother?
Would she be sad?
Would she worry?

His gentle, calm competency
always brought me a feeling of
safety.
And so it should,
for more than a decade later
he gently reached into my own abdomen
and artfully,
ever so carefully,
lifted out my gangrenous appendix –
backwards.

I wonder in which heaven that gentle soul resides now?
This man,
this surgeon,
my mother’s best hope,
who, for a time, at least
gave back to her
two of her daughters.

Sometimes,
when the moon is full,
and the candles that illuminate my mind
burn brightly,
so that I cannot find
that sweet, dark passage
to sleep,
I roll over
and spoon up close
to him
and drape my arm across his body, where,
even in his sleep,
he clasps it close to his chest.
And I trick Time at its own game,
the one where it says it is
a line
with a past,
a present.
and a future,
and I know that time is
a sphere,
a fabric
that encompasses the two of us here.
I know there have been times when I have been
without him,
and there will be times again
when he will leave me
utterly alone in the world.
I will cry out in my anguish,
“Bring him back to me!
How could you take him from me!?”
And there, under the full moon,
I imagine that he has come back
to me,
in my longing
and my loss,
and I feel my arm held tightly under his,
and I feel his bare gootsicka
against my bare lap,
and my belly in the small of his back
and my breasts against his smooth skin,
and I smile in my gratitude and
good fortune
that,
having lost him to Time,
I find him again
in my arms.

They use to look at him
as the wild one of the family,
the outrider.
“Oh, dear!”
Just like his grandmother,
my mother,
the Sagittarius,
the black sheep,
yet, the manager,
the perfectionist,
the lover of life.
Just like her father,
the Sagittarius,
the rule bender,
the builder,
the craftsman,
the devourer of life.
They who run to greet each new day.
They who challenge each new moment.
They who live without fear,
but ask only for the strength to accept
what is.
Is it the December birthdays?
Or is it the genes?
Who knows.

They used to look at him
as the wild child.
And now, looking at all
that lust for life teaches,
now they look to him
to show up for them,
to listen to them,
to counsel them,
Now they look to him
to lead.

What if God does not know.
What if God is still learning.
What if each of us is a shard,
a little piece of God,
figuring out what is
to be.
What if I am God experiencing what it means to be
Me,
And you are God experiencing what it is to be
You.
And God learns
through each of our pains and loves and joys and losses.
Do you understand then
how beautiful your pain becomes?
How valuable all your mistakes are?
How sacred all your missteps?
Your selfishness,
your fears,
your love,
your desperate, heroic acts,
reaching out
through fear
to love?
You are God’s
teacher.
Be courageous.