Poetry of Dying

Poetry and dying go together because when we’re facing the end of our life, our senses sharpen and our ocean of words distill into a surging river of images and metaphors.

 

Many of us would not want to take time away from living our last months to sit at a desk and deliberate over the right words to describe our dying. We would prefer to do some of the remaining items on our bucket list, or simply to enjoy each day free of everyone’s expectations.

 

Two poets came to my attention recently because two nonfiction writers I know were friends with the authors—Suzanne Roberts with the poet Ilyse Kusnetz, who wrote Angel Bones, and Wendy Fontaine with the poet Julie Hungiville Lemay, who wrote The Echo of Ice Letting Go. 

 

Both poets name their fears for the reality facing them, and speak about the unknowns swirling around, the what ifs, the maybes and the perhaps, and try to hold them suspended in the air as they consider what each one would mean. They explore the dark corridors and back rooms of what is happening to them as they deal with cancer, trying to live the fullness of each day without thinking about how many more they might have. Their books are honest, filled with courage and daring, and draw on images from nature.

 

Do normal days ever exist again after a doctor says you have a terminal illness, or do shadows push their way into every happy and mundane thought?

 

Most of us go through life with the illusion of endless time. If we don’t feel like doing something today, we figure we will always have tomorrow, or next week, or twenty years in the future to take care of it. Yet Ilyse and Julie were not old when they died, only 50 and 64. One died of breast cancer and the other of ovarian cancer.

 

Kusnetz believed that for grief to be more than suffering and become transforming, it needed to be shared, and she felt that “Poetry is the closest grief has to expression in language.”

 

Paraphrasing her—Even if sorrow lives like a seed inside beauty, we know it cannot last. May beauty fill the unexpected vistas of your life, and may you be opened by it to the world and to each other. (3) “The river is a green heaven, the body / a refuge, the current a blessing.” (52) And, in her parting words in the book, she wanted her family and friends to know that while she might be physically gone, she would still be transmitting messages to them. (77)

 

Did writing help Lemay continue the path she had been on before diagnosis, or did it start her off in a new direction? Did she see the truth of life with greater clarity, like the view of the Alaskan mountains in the distance on an utterly clear day? Did cancer’s removal of her long-term goals help her live in this moment more attuned to the particulars around her, and spur her to be completely open and honest with others? As Lemay dealt with the reality of her looming death, as she listened to the wilderness in her hours of solitude, I think she found the reassurance and solace she needed.

 

Many of her lines of poetry made me pause: “She wants you to know / this place of her. She holds / the dark fragrance in her bright palm, / leaves as small and infinite as stars.” (30) “In the distance, / the glacier calves / … / I listen to the sound of the water, / the echo of letting go.” (42) “There is loneliness in not knowing, in being / unable to read the secret / of open skies …” (93) “Bury me to the sky. / Let my bones be alms / for the birds.” (94)

 

May we be poets with our lives.