February 13: Close Encounters with Grief, Sharon Olds, "The Mortal One"

You will have to forgive me if I dwell on my father's life and death this week.  Until I am done with funeral home and funeral and funeral lunch, I'm sort of stuck in this limbo of holding on and letting go.  It's very easy to obsess in this state.

Of course, I have distractions:  work, teaching, my children, my house.  However, these things take my mind away from my dad for a little while, and then he asserts himself again.  This afternoon, I was eating a blueberry paczki because it is Fat Tuesday.  In the middle of a bite, I had to stop, because I suddenly remembered how my father loved paczkis.  For a small man, he could easily eat two or three in a sitting.  At that moment, I found myself completely drowning in sadness.

That's my life right now.  A series of close encounters with grief.

Again, I turn to Sharon Olds, who wrote an entire collection of poems centered around the loss of her father.  It's sort of a tonic to read her struggles with mortality and grief and acceptance.

Please forgive Saint Marty if he occasionally wallows.

The Mortal One

by:  Sharon Olds

All my life I had seen that long
glazed yellow narrow body,
not like Christ but like one of his saints,
or a hermit in gilt, all knees and raw ribs--
the ones who died of nettles, bile,
the one who died roasted over a fire.
I am glad we burned my father before
the bloom of mold could grow from him,
maybe it had begun in his bowels but we burned his bowels,
cleansing them with fire.  Now I am learning
to think of his corpse without shock,
almost without grief, to take
the thought of it into each day, the way
when a loom parts the vertical threads,
half to the left half to the right, one can
throw the shuttlecock through with the warp-thread
tied to its feet, that small gold figure of my father--
how often I saw him in paintings and did not know him,
the tiny naked dead one in the corner,
the mortal one.