Mark Liebenow - Grief (formerly Widowers Grief)
“Speaking of That … which we weren’t” was published in the Chautauqua Literary Journal. This is a print-only journal, so you can’t read it online.
But “Fragile, Fracture, Fear” is online. It was published by Cleaver Magazine, and this is the link:
https://www.cleavermagazine.com/fragile-by-mark-liebenow/
gratefully,
Mark
It’s late December and the woods are quiet.
I stand in my backyard lost in the mystery of trees. Two squirrels chase each other through the snow and deepening shadows. I listen to trees creak in the breeze, and hear the soft click-click-click of empty sunflower shells land on each other, dropped by wrens and finches at the feeder. The magenta of sunset flows across the sky, then shifts to rose.
But for those who lost loved ones this year, it will be a blue Christmas, a blue Hannukah.
This passage in Psalm 126 (echoed in Matthew 21) speaks of two realities of life: sorrow and hope. Someone is weeping, yet they go out to plant a new crop so that people will have something to eat in the future.
As I slowly made my way through the landscape of grief, I began to find words that were capable of expressing the depths and devastation of the grief I felt, and how it flowed and meandered like water.
“Like Water” is my essay on losing Evelyn and how we like to tease Death by taking risks, some of the dangerous, until someone we dearly love dies. It was published this month by the superb Linden Review, one of the few literary journals that is dedicated to exploring the complexities of the word health.
You can read my essay at this link: https://www.lindenreview.com/liebenow-like-water
Under the Sun literary journal chose my essay as one of its nominations for the Pushcart Prize.
The essay recounts my hike up to the top of Clouds Rest in Yosemite, at nearly 10,000 feet, when I was trying to find a place of acceptance after the death of my wife Evelyn:
Steven Church – “Pooling Resources”
Ren Cedar Fuller – “Naming My Father
Wes Lee – “Maybe Tomorrow”
Mark Liebenow – “Walking West with a Mountain”
Kathleen Melin – “Strangely Wonderful”
Elaine Palencia – “Right Here with E.T.”
You can read the essay at this link:
https://underthesunonline.com/wordpress/2023/683-2
Mark Liebenow writes about nature, grief, and wisdom of fools. The author of four books, his essays, poems, and critical reviews have been published in numerous literary journals. His work has been named a notable by Best American Essays and nominated for four Pushcart Prizes. Mark has won the River Teeth Nonfiction Book Award, and the Chautauqua and Literal Latte’s essay prizes. He studied English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and creative nonfiction at Bradley University. markliebenow.com
This is the best book I’ve found that covers the scope of prostate cancer—history, treatments, research. There are quite a few articles that deal with specific topics in a limited way, but Helen Valier has brought everything together, and her book answers most of my questions. I say most because her book came out in 2016, and medical advances have continued to occur over the last seven years. One example is the development of the PSMA-PET test that can detect trace amounts of cancer cells that traditional scans miss.
After the death of a spouse or a loved one, lethargy quickly sets in. It’s hard to find the motivation to do anything. The normal activities of living—shopping for food, cooking, cleaning the dishes, doing laundry—feel like a weight that drags our entire body down.
Anne Boyer’s book about surviving aggressive triple-negative breast cancer, The Undying, takes the reader inside what it feels like to endure chemotherapy without any promise of surviving. Boyer covers a wide range of topics—the physical suffering, fears about dying, figuring out how to cope with pain, research into the medical treatments, the philosophy and history of breast cancer procedures, and the social inequalities of a for-profit health care system.
Robin Williams died on August 11, 2014 from suicide. It’s hard to believe that it’s been that long.
Williams was dealing with Lewy body dementia that progresses quickly and is marked by depression, anxiety, paranoia, and hallucinations. His death brought light to a difficult subject, and the discussions I heard afterward spoke of the mental illness aspect of suicide. Recent studies have taken the blame off those who kill themselves, and removed the guilt from family and friends who felt there was something more they could have done to save them.
The two biggest problems when a child is grieving is that the child’s feelings are often discounted and that adults try to protect the child from feeling pain by lying to them about what happened.
“The river of grief is the heart of the ocean that continues to surge after the ocean is gone.” - Mark Liebenow
