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updated January 3,
2002 -- writing about death and related topics
Click here to go and read William Fryer Harvey's eerie, beautiful and thought provoking short story "August Heat", and insightful alternate endings to the story written by a class of middle school students.
In the autumn of 2000, Diane Wilson Flynn was kind and brave enough to share her family's story with us:
This is a poem that I wrote after the birth of my granddaughter.
Caillin Maighread Flynn, the second daughter of my son Tim and his wife Julie, was stillborn on the 21st of November, 1994. A perfectly-formed, beautiful baby, Caillie was the victim of an umbilical cord accident a few days before her scheduled caesarean birth. The loss of this child was, and still remains, a devastating event in our family history.
In my study of family history I have come across stories of parental loss so devastating that I wonder how my forebears found the faith to bear them. Third great-grandparents Almira (Gunn) and George W. Montgomery of the town of Onondaga outlived all of their four children, three of whom died before marriageable age. Their only remaining daughter died bearing her eleventh child in 1880 -- and their son-in-law, David Curtis Dodge, gave the baby up for adoption. Apparently George and Almira had something to do with finding the child a loving home, for they were found in the household of the adoptive parents four months later. The baby girl grew up despising her natural father -- as did many of the rest of the family. In 1899, one of my husband's granduncles lost all four of his young children to scarlet fever during the course of one week in May here in California. I weep for all these families, too -- and for all people whose children have been torn from their arms.
Tim and Julie were. . . lucky enough to have another little girl, Maeve, who was born in December, 1996. I swear that the infant Maeve looked exactly like her little sister who died before birth.
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A
poem by e.e. cummings,
1926
I can't exactly tell you why this poem ,which actually I find not so accessible, and somewhat flip, keeps coming to mind when I'm visiting cemeteries, places which I find very special when one considers the persons remembered there, the lovely tombstones, but I thought I'd offer it to you. To me, it seems to say something of the transience of earthly life and passion and even of earthly monuments.
You're probably somewhat familiar with cummings' work; as per his characteristic style, the capitalization/lower case choices, verse breaks and line breaks are his, at least as per The Norton Anthology from which I'm taking this.
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(ponder, darling, these busted statues
by e.e. cummings
(ponder, darling, these busted statues
of yon motheaten forum be aware
notice what hath remained
--the stone cringes
clinging to the stone, how obsolete
lips utter their extant smile. . . .
remark
a few deleted of texture
or meaning monuments and dolls
resist Them Greediest Paws of careful
time all of which is extremely
unimportant) whereas Life
matters if or
when the your- and my-
idle
vertical worthless
self unite in a peculiarly
momentary
partnership (to instigate
constructive
Horizontal
business. . . . even so,let us make haste
---consider well this ruined aqueduct
lady,
which used to lead something into somewhere)
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E-mail Fran with comments, or with death-related poetry you'd like to submit, your own or others'. No promises made on posting it, but it's worth a try
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