poetry lost & found: anniversary post

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Writing without the deeply personal is not the whole story of grief. To give the whole story, to give as many handholds as possible in the steep climb of grief, we need to hear personal stories. Each Friday, I’ll post something from my own experience of grief and love. It’s an inside look at love, at grief, at life.

This week is our anniversary.

We “courted” for so long; three months of crossword puzzles, books read together and discussed over tea, messages left for the other in newspaper articles and margins.

In those first few months of courting, he would leave his paper for me to find, saving half the crossword for me, wishing me a good day in the margins. I left him messages by underlining random words in an article to make a poem or a song.

We had just talked about that – the messages we left for each other – a few weeks before he drowned. He told me “I still leave you some every once in awhile, but I don’t know that you find them.”

We probably both missed so many hidden notes.

For our anniversary, my love, I have left you a message (though not terribly romantic), underlined in the NYT.

Hope you find it.

It is obvious

very much apparent

painful on all sides

Death is so exhaustive

like climbing Mt. Everest

No less confounding, still surprising.

this was an accident.

was not supposed to have been.

In her grievance, she cannot align herself

Happenstance catastrophe

intimate inescapable

I’m sorry these two could not speak the story

from start to finish

How I wish this whole ride was done.

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