Poetry

Anyone with some time to waste can click on the link to Cranky Patient's poetry. When I put the poems up last night, I realized that there was a lot of talk about death. I hope it is just because I am at that place, where people I love are following that natural pattern of leaving, the previous generation slowly moving on.

I know that I am influenced by death in ways I don't even realize by the loss of my dad when I was thirteen, and perhaps that intimacy with death influences my writing. My husband once said that I had never gotten over my dad dying. May be. But what does getting over mean anyway? In one sense, I must have "gotten over it" or I would have stayed stuck in that moment, the singular moment when everything changed. In another sense, that one moment influenced who I am today, so it is always with me. For example, I've thought about how I would live when I became a widow. Not if, when. My mother said she never thought about becoming a widow. Guess you go with what you know.

Losing more loved ones, or close calls like my aunt's illness last year, gets me thinking about life and love and loss in ways that may have been dormant while building a marriage and raising kids. Not that I haven't suffered losses since my dad, there have been many, including three vibrant teenagers, two cousins in their 20's, and several in their forties who left behind young families, none of whom should have gone so soon. All were mourned. But something different is going on now in my head.

Perhaps it is my head that is in a different place. Turning 50 seems to have had a profound effect on my thinking processes (those that I can remember anyway), and it certainly has become a time of intense introspection, not unlike adolescence, but without the acne and worries about who to ask to prom (all girls school, we had to ask). If only that body, this brain. Heavy sigh.