Tag: Grief

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Grief Deferred

Tending to Endings (thirty-nine)

My journal entry was dated August 2017. John and I had finally gotten around to our anniversary camping trip though we married in June. I was journaling next to Marsh Creek when I wrote: I did not say goodbye to Elkhaven, and now the new owners are already in.

Elkhaven was the home John built in the mountains outside of Boise that became our family home for seven years during Gabe and Dylan’s grade school and middle school years. The boys were seven when John and I met, and they helped finish building the house before we moved in. After a day of work and play, we would grill steaks and potatoes over the fire. Then we would line our sleeping bags on the new house deck and look for Orion in the night sky before falling to sleep.  

It was a storied place, the way all family homes are full of stories, some common and some more unique, like having to carry snowshoes in the car so we could climb up the ridge to get home in a storm, or waking up to a herd of elk outside our bedroom window, or spending weekends making an archery range or a tobogganing hill in the yard.

It was a home surrounded by trees and sky and trails and solitude. There were challenges and inconveniences. Friends considered it a wilderness adventure to come visit and at some point each spring our driveway would turn the consistency of cake batter. It was the home where I felt most at peace and most myself. I felt lucky to live there every day.

We left Elkhaven in 2011, but we didn’t know we were leaving for good. We decided to rent a small house in town for a variety of practical reasons: gas prices were high, and my teaching job became full-time, and the boys had busy high school schedules and had just learned to drive. I didn’t want to worry about them taking icy mountain roads to get home.

We figured, we would live in both places. The mint green rental house we found had pink carpet in the bedrooms and pheasant light fixtures in the entryway and an odd floor plan. But it was our part-time, temporary house. Elkhaven was home.

Only, life continued to pick up its pace, and over the next couple years, we spent but a few nights as a family up at Elkhaven. Eventually, when the kids started college and we decided to rent out our mountain home.

In the spring of 2017, when we put Elkhaven on the market, I spent long hours at the college and Gabe and Dylan were graduating from universities on opposite ends of the country. There were concerts and track meets and graduations requiring travel to attend. My mom was having cancer surgery and so after Gabe’s graduation in Lexington, Kentucky, I rented a car and drove to the hospital in Evanston, Illinois to meet my parents and sisters post-surgery. I didn’t have time for grief.

And so it happened in August of 2017 that I was sitting next to the creek with John on our belated anniversary trip and our only outdoor trip of the summer, when it occurred to me that a home I had loved more than any other was already gone.

Getting Elkhaven ready for sale (2017). Laura, Dylan, Jane, Gabe in front of the mint green rental (2011)

There are many reasons I don’t always honor losses in my life when they happen. Sometimes it is fear of the pain. Sometimes it is that I feel I need my energy for something else. Sometimes I don’t know what I’m losing until later. Sometimes it is old habit. Elkhaven was probably a combination of all of these. It certainly wasn’t the first time I postponed grief.

During my high school years I abruptly stopped swimming. Before that, I had spent many hours each day in a pool with a team I considered my family. Swim team went from being the most important part of my life and the holder of my biggest dreams to being nothing at all. There were a variety of reasons for that change that involved alcoholism and an eating disorder and a great deal of shame.

By the time I turned seventeen I began recovering and let go of much of the self-destructive behavior. But it would be years before I would get back in a pool again to swim. During those years, each time I thought or my swim team memories, I felt some combination of sadness and regret and longing and shame. Mostly I did my best to not think of it at all.

By the time I got in a pool to swim laps again, I was in my twenties and living in San Diego. A friend was competing in triathlons and I thought, why not? I began swimming masters swim workouts at the Carlsbad Pool and I remembered what I loved about moving through water. Swimming had been the one sport I tried as a kid that came naturally to me. And I found that even as an adult I enjoyed all of it: the hard work, the rhythm of swimming, the laughter with other swimmers between sets, the fluidity of moving through water.

Grief–the kind that moves me towards wholeness and healing–seems to involve some alchemy of stillness and action for me. I have to slow down enough to feel, but then, I can’t think my way through grief. It helps to do something that connects me to what was lost. In this case, to get in the pool and swim.

Swimming didn’t bring back my high school years or dreams. But those few years I competed in triathlons returned to me my love of swimming. Today I feel being a swimmer is always a part of me, the way I am always a writer and a teacher and a mom.

In this way, movement through grief seems more like an opening than a closing. Now when I think of my high school years, I do not feel regret or shame. I feel some nostalgia and a lot of gratitude. Memories of my swimming days make me smile. These days when I swim, whether I am in the surf near Maui or a lane at the West Boise Y, I am home.

The loss of my mom was new for me because I was able to grieve her in real time. I had left my job and my life was at a turning point and thanks to John’s work and savings, I didn’t have to rush back into a new career. Our society isn’t really set up to allow for this kind of grief process, so I feel incredibly fortunate it happened for me. I was able to spend days and weeks after her death falling apart and talking to friends and going for meandering walks on the hills and eventually writing a book.

The pace of my life allowed for such things and also for memory and sadness and gratitude and even joy to surface. Even now, small actions are the things that make me feel close to my mom: my hands in the dirt planting or doing a New York Times Crossword or pulling her jacket from the hanger to wear it on my walk.

Last month, we sold the last of the land that was in Elkhaven. I do not feel regret. We have a home we love on the edge of town with trails off the backyard and nights dark enough to see the stars. I feel grateful to live here everyday.

But Elkhaven is a loss, too. And this one I suspect is mixed up with the loss of those years when we still had kids at home and John and I were building a life as well as a house together.

And so, I asked the boys and John to drive up up to the mountains next weekend with me. Miraculously, they all say yes, Sunday afternoon is free. We will hike in the national forest that used to be our backyard and probably tell some Elkhaven stories and gather firewood for a friend. I will finally say goodbye to Elkhaven, and more importantly, thank you.

If you are interested in reading more about our Elkhaven Days, here is a piece that was published years ago in High Country News about the Perils of Spring.

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No Time at All

Tending to Endings (thirty-eight)

It is true our lives

will betray us in the end

but life knows where it is going. 

—Linda Hogan, Parting

My first reaction upon hearing from my sister on Friday night that Ruth Bader Ginsburg had died was noooooooo. It was resistance to the tumult and chaos that was about to ensue, still six weeks before the election. So many of us wanted her to hold on. She so wanted to hold on. My first reaction was self-centered fear.

But I have walked close to death recently and so it didn’t take but a minute to pull myself back, to pause and remember what this is. To whisper to the night: Thank you. Safe Passage. Much love. You were brilliant. Go in peace knowing what you gave us was more than enough. For, don’t we all deserve to be sent off on a wave of love? I want to be that love.

And then, what I knew next–RBG is still with us. We haven’t lost what matters most, so long as we pay attention.

I recently listened to a friend’s story of caring for her mother. Cat’s mother died only a few weeks ago and I got to sit on the bank of the Snake River in Hagerman and listen to her story of the long, hard illness and the quiet moments during caregiving, and the magic that happened between them in the days leading up to her mom’s death.

Cat said, “People keep asking if I’m alright, and my heart is actually OK. Grief is quickly followed by comfort and my relationship with my mom has grown even stronger. When I find that very quiet space inside of myself that’s where I can find her.”

And I knew what she meant. I do grieve the loss of being able to call my mom and talk through the election or the last book or whether the plant that surprised me in my yard is a flower or a weed. I miss being able to sit with her or travel with her or play a game of Scrabble.

But, also, I feel as close to my mom as I ever have. She is with me. So is my friend Susan and my mentor Pat and my grandma Jean. When I go to that quiet place within me, these soul friends welcome me. I rely on them.

It always feels tricky to write about things of the spirit that happen in such interior spaces. I worry it will sound like I’m trying to talk people into a particular belief, which is not my aim. So I’ll just say that my experience of death has changed as I’ve spent more time with those who are dying and especially since the death of my mom. One of the things I carry with me is that my relationship with my mom or my friend Pat or my friend Susan or my grandmother are transformed, but not ended.

I don’t fully understand any this. Sometimes I wish I came from a culture where interaction with the souls of those who have departed is accepted in everyday life—where they show up in dreams and stories and across the dinner table—because I don’t always have the language to talk about these experiences.

But I know it is true that my mom helps me every day.

So why not RBG as well? True, I didn’t know her personally. But her work transformed our culture and the way many of us see ourselves and the world. She is with us.

Like many of us, I am troubled by the fact that we seem to be living out the plot to a dystopian novel lately. We are told we are polarized. And maybe we are. Or maybe the loudest voices are and we are living in a culture that has incentivized and thus magnified the extremes: those willing to take up arms, those seeking to confound rather than to understand. Or maybe sometimes the person we identify as the fringe is someone acting on impulse having a particularly bad day.

None of this is to say that we aren’t standing–collectively and individually–on a precipice or that things couldn’t tumble in a variety of directions. My own sense, though, is that the choice before us is ultimately not between left and right. And it is not about finding some happy middle. Instead, I suspect the radical choice that matters is whether we are going to dig deep and find the courage to choose love? Or are we going to let fear have the day?

Last week I included a link to a podcast of an interview between Krista Tippett and angel Kyoda williams, a Zen priest, activist, and author of Being Black: Zen and the Art of Living with Fearlessness and Grace. During the interview, williams describes this kind of love that relies on internal work and action in a way that I found helpful:

It is developing our own capacity for spaciousness within ourselves to allow others to be as they are — that that is love. And that doesn’t mean that we don’t have hopes or wishes that things are changed or shifted, but that to come from a place of love is to be in acceptance of what is, even in the face of moving it towards something that is more whole, more just, more spacious for all of us. Its bigness. Its allowance. Its flexibility. It’s saying the thing that we talked about earlier, of “Oh, those police officers are trapped inside of a system, as well. They are subject to an enormous amount of suffering, as well.”

I think that those things are missed when we shortcut talking about King, or we shortcut talking about Gandhi. We leave out the aspects of their underlying motivation for moving things, and we make it about policies and advocacy, when really it is about expanding our capacity for love, as a species

Later in the interview, williams identifies the kind of action that comes from that place of love:

I think that if we can move our work, whatever work we’re up to, whatever kind of desire that we have for our own development in life, to be willing to face discomfort and receive it as opportunity for growth and expansion and a commentary about what is now more available to us, rather than what it is that is limiting us and taking something away from us, that we will — in no time at all, we will be a society that enhances the lives of all our species.

And that is the phrase that makes my heart catch: no time at all. Tippett comments on it, too, the hope inherent in that statement, and williams confirms it is exactly what she means.

…we are evolving at such a pace — even what we’re experiencing now in our society, we’re just cycling through it. We’re digesting the material of the misalignment. We’re digesting the material of how intolerable it is to be so intolerant. We’re digesting the material of 400, 500 years of historical context that we have decided to leave behind our heads, and we are choosing to turn over our shoulders and say: I must face this, because it is intolerable to live in any other way than a way that allows me to be in contact with my full, loving, human self.

My mom, too, believed in this kind of love and the power of it to transform. She might express it differently, at least to me, her daughter. For, when I bring my fretting about the election and about the supreme court seat to the quietest place in myself, Mom responds with her half smile and a glint in her eye, Oh, Laura, so you think the fate of equality and our nation rests on one 87 year old woman staying on the bench?

And she is not trying to diminish RBG’s work or the importance of this election or what follows. She is reminding me that strategy and politics will not be enough to save us. For that we need a Love that includes all of us.

A Question for Readers

Thank you for reading Tending to Endings. In a future issue I am planning to write about ways to begin conversations with parents about end-of-life planning. Have you had conversations with your parents that have gone well or not so well? What did you learn? Or, have your kids brought the discussion to you? How did it go?

If you are willing to share your experience or thoughts or questions on this topic, please send an email (or a voice memo file if that is easier) to Laura@laurastavoe.com.

Tending to Endings runs each Friday. If you would like to subscribe please leave your name and email below.

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Fear Itself

Tending to Endings (thirty-six)

On the morning of September 11, 2001 after I saw television coverage of a plane hitting the second tower of the World Trade Center and realized something horrible and big and very scary was happening in our country, I drove to work early. Normally I worked from home in the morning and taught middle and high school English in the afternoons at Riverstone International School in Boise. But on this morning, I got in the car and drove in early because my sons were in Ms. Rose’s first grade class at Riverstone. The first thing my fear wanted on the morning buildings were hit by planes was to be in the same building as my sons.

Fear has long been my nemesis. My parents would tell a story about how one summer while we were on vacation, they wanted me to overcome my fear of jumping into the swimming pool. They would count, one, two, three—and I would bend my knees in preparation for launch. But something stopped me each and every time. I think I was afraid of breaking my heels or anklebones on the bottom of the pool or water going up my nose and drowning or some invisible monster lurking in the deep end. I had an active imagination.

My parents promised me I would be fine. Then they promised me ice cream sundaes with two scoops, then three. Pretty soon —just to see how far this would go—mom promised a new bicycle, and eventually a Barbie Playhouse, which she was totally against. We weren’t allowed to have toys that were advertised on TV. Other families eventually joined in on cheering me on. Even with added peer pressure, I remained firmly on the concrete, my toes gripping the pool ledge.

On the drive home from Wisconsin, no one else in my family seemed overly concerned by my failure—it was a funny Laura story, as they told it—but what I remember feeling was despair.

It wasn’t only jumping into pools that scared me as a kid. I was afraid of dogs, being tickled, roller coasters, berries that might be poisonous, spent fireworks, being alone in our unfinished basement, and the way bubble bath suds would expand exponentially under the thump of the faucet. Bubbles may seem harmless to the average person, but after my bath I lay in bed imagining foam filling up the whole bathroom and moving down the hall towards the room where I slept.

I did eventually jump in a pool and even became a competitive swimmer and a lifeguard. According to my mom this happened because I finally took lessons from Mr. Finny who was a bald man with a gruff, raspy voice and a huge belly. He would bark instructions from the pool deck. Mom said, I was more afraid of Gil Finny than the water.  It was a success of sorts, but I couldn’t count on Mr. Finny to be standing on deck every time I needed to do something scary.

I could write a book on all my methods of trying to manage fear. Much of my early life I tried the closed-eyes-and-try-not-to-think-about-it variety of getting through. Or I would vacillate between complete avoidance and immersion therapy, throwing myself into new situations before I had time to be afraid. Results varied.

I’ve never found FDR’s famous quote about nothing to fear but fear itself all that helpful. If I am afraid of the pool, or the new job, or the course of climate change, or the pandemic, and I fail at talking my way out of that fear, it means I actually do have something to fear. Maybe not the thing, but my fear. Which is kind of scary, right? It’s the bubbles expanding exponentially all over again.

Gabe and Dylan on the Main Salmon. Laura, Dylan, and Gabe on the Lower Owyhee. (circa 2002)

On September 11, 2001, I was afraid, but what made me get in that car and drive to school was a desire to make sure I was near my kids in case they needed me. This may not have been logical or noble. There wasn’t anything I really could do at school, and it wasn’t like I was running into a burning building. I just sat in the teacher prep room and talked with other teachers about what was happening and how we were going to help our students and our children and ourselves cope with the tragedy still unfolding.

But when I think back to the that day, the difference between that and many other frightening times in my life was that I was not thinking of myself.

I can take no credit for this impulse of course. It came with the kids, this freedom from self-centered fear. But the example has been more useful to me than advice from Nike ad campaigns or my own attempts at fear management.

I realize not everyone needs to become a parent to discover the power of love, but motherhood gave me a crash course in getting over myself. It was like a freebie view into what life can be like when I’m not buckling under the weight of self-centeredness. And it came without any effort on my part, like grace. Of course raising kids took work. But I never once had to talk myself into loving them.

Dylan on the Middle Fork of the Salmon River, September 2020. (photo credit Ali Smith)

People talk about whether disaster bring out the best or the worst in people. And the answer for me is both, sometimes both in the same day or hour. Love doesn’t always come as easily as it did on a river of maternal hormones. Sometimes I think of how I can be helpful. Other times I sob or get snippy with the Verizon representative or have an anxiety attack or spend an afternoon in bed. Sometimes I have to remember to turn my attention to love and then to practice doing so again.

When I taught high school I learned that I could only teach well by loving my students. Other strategies failed because I was terrified to be up there in front of that class. There were so many variables to any given lesson plan, so much could go wrong interacting with 160 teenagers each day. If I was thinking about me and whether I was doing a good job, I’d never make it.

But if I was thinking about them, about who they were and what they needed and how I might help, well, then the fear lifted. I didn’t have to tell them I loved them, which would’ve been awkward and maybe unprofessional. What mattered was showing up with their wellbeing at the center. It meant listening to who they were and helping them find their way. The result was that teaching was a lot more rewarding and time consuming and fun. We formed a community.

Some call it service work, but it feels more reciprocal to me than that. I think of what I turned to on that day nineteen years ago. I wrote poems with my students and reached out to my one friend in New York and listened to those who were worried about loved ones they hadn’t yet heard from. I held my sons as much as they would let me and then played with them in the backyard before dinner.

When I asked others what they had done on the day of the attacks: they reached out to loved ones, gardened, played with the dog, went for a walk, baked bread. Acts of love.

It is another September full of loss. We do not know the extent or what will be left or what we will create anew. We are mid story in the pandemic, in the fire season, in the election, in the climate emergency, in the injustice still unreckoned. Fear is a seductive force and there are plenty of invitations to stoke it.

Or, I can show up for Love.

More Resources

A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster. Rebecca Solnit, (2009).


The study of disasters makes it clear that there are plural and contingent natures–but the prevalent human nature in disaster is resilient, resourceful, generous, empathic, and brave.–from the book’s prelude, Falling Together.

John Lewis: Good Trouble. A documentary film about the legendary civil rights leader who died in July, and definitely a story about love in action.

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Listening, Learning

Boise Foothills, February 20, 2015

Tending to Endings (thirty-four)

In 2015, my friend Roya called to ask if I’d speak at our friend Pat’s Celebration of Life. Roya is a minister and was officiating the service, and Pat had been a close friend and spiritual mentor of mine for fifteen years. Pat was 82, but her death came only one week after a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. She was beloved in a wide circle of friends and our community was reeling from the unexpected loss of her. I felt both the honor and the weight of being asked to share at her service.

I told Roya, of course I would speak, and then I did what I do: I opened a file on my computer and began typing. I wrote pages and then took a bunch out and moved paragraphs around until I had a beginning, a middle, and an end. I added more sensory detail. I edited each sentence. I read it aloud and fiddled with wording and then read it aloud again. It made me tear up which seemed a good sign. Then I sent it to Roya to see what she thought.  

Roya was kind. She said something like, “This is beautiful essay about Pat that you might publish somewhere, but I’m not sure it is what people will need from you at the service.” She added, “It might good to bring a few notes up with you but to speak more from the heart. Friends and family will be hurting, and they will want to connect.”

I wasn’t thinking of that. I was thinking of how I was going to get through this talk and how I could possibly make it good enough to honor Pat. Fine goals, but I was missing one that Roya saw because she had been through this many times before.

I’ve been thinking of things I’ve learned from people who have dedicated their professional lives to end-of-life care. So often when I listen to their experiences, I hear about an angle missing from my own view. Often it is a perspective that both humbles and helps me.

Since beginning this blog, I’ve found opportunities to talk with people who spend many hours with those at the end-of-life and their families. In this week’s post I’m sharing a few insights they’ve shared with me that have helped broaden my perspective.

On Helping Families

Humans are made with a capacity to tolerate grief. And, in fact, until we know that space where love was, that is now empty, we cannot know it will one day be a source of something powerful and important in our life. So, I think when I approach dying people, and their families, it is from a place of nonverbal confidence that they can do this, that in fact there is the possibility at end-of-life of something beautiful to find in the experience. –Norm, Hospice Chaplain

Here is something I learned a long time ago. There are many things worse than death, the actual death is not the hard part. The fear, the pain, and suffering can be very hard. My 28-year-old niece has a recurrent cancer. It is not an immediate death notice, more likely a notice of a serious marathon of difficult surgery and chemo. My sister is grieving. For my part, right now, I am a sister rather than a cancer nurse, trying to be a listener, not a know-it-all. It seems that my encouragement of my sister as a strong advocate for her daughter brings Pam the most comfort. We want to know that what we do matters and that comes in the middle of so much helplessness. The intangible actions such as listening, reassuring and acknowledging feel so helpful. — Jane, former Oncology Nurse

Families are all so different. I try not to go into the experience with any assumptions about what each person may or may not be feeling. I’m there to help support them with caregiving and coping with the end-of-life, and to help them tap into their own strengths and get through it together.–Kathe, Hospice Social Worker

On Care in the Time of Covid

Although we haven’t been able to do volunteer visits due to COVID, we look for other ways to help. When the pandemic started, a number of volunteers immediately went to work on a mask project. Some volunteers have been able to do visits over the phone or FaceTime. And our staff has been reaching out to our colleagues who work within the longterm care facilities, sending them cards and pastries and letting them know we are thinking of them. Their jobs are so hard right now. We try to support them in any way we can. –Desiree, Hospice Volunteer Coordinator

One of the things that has been happening lately is that families who never expected to care for loved ones at home are now doing so because of COVID. So some of our hospice work has been helping families succeed in doing this care. And for the same reason, we now also have end-of-life patients who are isolated in hospitals and facilities due to COVID precautions. So we are discovering new ways to help them connect to their loved ones—like window phone calls and FaceTime and tele-health and more in nursing home care. –Norm, Hospice Chaplain

On Listening to the Dying

My friend Dia, who worked in the hospice field for years, has been such a gift to me as I’ve navigated this topic. Last winter, during a walk along the Boise River, she shared some of her experiences and I still hear her voice whenever I start thinking of what my own role might be.

Laura, when I started hospice work, I truly thought I was gonna be God’s little gift to the dying. I’d go in and strew all my caring and pearls of wisdom over them and then they’d have a good death. Boy, did I have it backwards! I just laugh at myself now because they were the ones who had all of the wisdom. They were the ones facing death, and they were my teachers. I still look at that hospice work as being the place where I learned more and gained more than anything else I’ve done.

Pat Lambert, July 2007.

Which brings me right back to humility. Sometimes for me this means listening to those who are already gone.

After my conversation with Roya, I went for a walk on the trails feeling lost and not at all up to speaking the next day. It wasn’t perfectionism that had me this time. I wanted to be honest when I spoke, and the truth was I felt sad and confused and a little angry at Pat for dying so fast. I was mad at myself, too, for not calling her more often in the months before, when I knew she wasn’t feeling well. I was utterly sad I didn’t get to see her one more time. These selfish feelings seemed unworthy of Pat’s Celebration speaker.

Somewhere during my hike, I brought my frustration directly to Pat, which felt childish, but I didn’t care. “You are the person I would talk to when I had a problem like this, Pat! If there is something you think I should say, will you please help? Because I am not feeling up to any of it.”

It was a relief just to say it aloud and I stood on the ridge and took a deep breath before heading home. Then I turned around and was completely surprised by a rainbow that arched from one golden hill to the next. It was February in Boise (not Rainbow Beach in Kaanapali), and the colors stretched across the whole sky.

“Well, okay, then,” I said to Pat. “Thank you.”

And I had at least one thing I could say to my beloved, grieving community, all of us aching and confused by the empty space where Pat was: We can be here for each other. And guess what, we can still talk to Pat, too. She told me so.

Tending to Endings is a weekly column that comes out each Friday. If you would like to subscribe, please leave your email below. You can also reach me at laura@laurastavoe.com.

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Poem Gifts

Tending to Endings (thirty-one)

Coping with loss has never been my strong suit. There have been times in my life when I have gone to great lengths in an attempt to avoid the repercussions: move across the country, take up a new obsession, fall in love. Sometimes I’d do all of those at once, as when, in my twenties, after fleeing a destructive relationship, I took up triathlons and found a new state, a new job, and a new boyfriend. Major changes provided temporary distractions, but of course ultimately were not up to the task.

Grief waits. One day you are plodding along an empty road in Nampa, Idaho, with only the high pitch of grasshoppers and the heat of high noon to keep you company. You are the sixty-fourth mile of a half Ironman, and the only thing left in your belly is loss. Your soul knows, you have not left anything behind—not the fear or the anger or the grief.

My friend Stephanie used to say it was time to worry about her when she would break out Mary Oliver’s book of New and Selected Poems. Oliver’s poems are something I turn to as well when my life is in transition, which generally means I’m in the midst of a great deal of loss.

Poetry gives relief but not distraction. Solace, maybe? A way through things that cannot be easily understood. Certain kinds of poems remind me in the middle of my grief that I am not alone. That wholeness lies beneath this hurt, the way a hummingbird coming into view on a long walk on a sad day reminds me that joy, too, is mine.

Since poetry is one of the ways I get through grief, I have wanted for a while to share some of my favorites. I realize poetry is not everyone’s thing, but years of teaching writers—third grade through adult—has made me think that poetry has a broader audience than many think with the right approach.

My friend, Mary Ellen, a poet who also taught middle and high school English for many years, once shared with me that she taught her students that poetry was not something to figure out like a puzzle. Instead it was a place to discover things, more like playing in a mud puddle where you might find a beautiful quartz stone and feel the cool earth squish beneath your fingers. I love this analogy of seeing poems not as problems to solve but as places to play.

Play cannot be rushed. In fact, play has to be an immersive experience in order to actually be play. Which leads me to another reason poems sometimes are forgotten. They take time. They aren’t skim-able. To receive a poem, I must slow down and open up. Which may be poetry’s other gift. The slowing, the opening as much as the poem.

My students and I would read a poem three times before we started talking about it: first silently and then aloud together and then again while we would underline words we liked the sound of or star things that jumped out at us or circled words we didn’t know. We always began talking about the things we noticed and things we felt rather than jumping to what the poem means. I have found this same process useful with art forms that I find more intimidating such as classical music or visual art. Rather than try and figure it out, I try to notice things, to take it in.

These days even the first couple lines of a well-loved poem calms me, meets my grief halfway, makes me feel known.

Before you know what kindness really is / you must lose things.

Kindness, Naomi Shihab Nye

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, / That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,…

Mending Wall, Robert Frost

August of another summer, and once again / I am drinking the sun…

The Pond, Mary Oliver

My favorite way to read poetry is not on a screen, but rather, from a book in the dark of early morning as part of my meditation time. Currently, one or two each morning from Linda Hogan’s Dark. Sweet. Hogan has been writing gorgeous poetry and prose for decades but she is new to me. I have a feeling I will carry her work within me like I do Mary Oliver.

To be held / by the light / was what I wanted, / to be a tree drinking the rain,

To Be Held, Linda Hogan

The world of poetry is vast, and I enjoy reading many different kinds for different reasons. The ones I’ve included here are some that have particularly helped me during hard times. And, of course, if you find one you love, all of these authors have collections available in print for you to read in the dark hours of morning.

Leaves and Blossoms Along the Way
Another favorite by Mary Oliver

A Ritual to Read to Each Other, William Stafford

Tear, by Linda Hogan

Widening Circles, Rainer Marie Rilke (translated and read by Joanna Macy)

Marie Howe wrote a gorgeous collection about grief and loss, What the Living Do. The title poem from that collections is here.

Donald Hall’s book Without is a full book of poems about his wife, Jane Kenyon, and their journey through her cancer. The title poem is here.

And here is one by Jane Kenyon that has long been a favorite from her book Otherwise: Let Evening Come, and another, Twilight: After Haying.

I subscribe to Brainpickings a weekly newsletter by writer Maria Popova. Most issues include at least one poem that would fit well in this collection as well as many other gems. Most recently an issue includes Patti Smith reading Emily Dickinson.

If you have poems or other forms of art you turn to during times of great change, I’d love to hear about them in the comments. You can also reach me at laura@laurastavoe.com.

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