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      October 3, 2018Compassionate FriendsAnne Starling

      Almost immediately, we feel
      we are too advanced for this group
      of grieving parents, his father and I;
      two months in, we’re clearly
      acing bereavement, differing from the
      poor souls around the conference
      table. Turns out the woman next
      to me has been coming for eight years
      (her husband stopped at six). She wears
      a tiny locket bearing the ashes
      of her daughter, killed in a car accident
      at seventeen. I’m horrified because
      ashes smashes, I don’t
      believe in ashes. Those are not his
      out in the studio, then the guest room—
      my son’s six-four and alive.
      The facilitator (her teenager committed
      suicide) asks me to tell the group one
      wonderful thing about my child. I don’t
      want to use the past tense to describe him.
      Finally, after she asks again, I tell
      a story from when he was three,
      and the talk was of India.
      On hearing many people there are poor,
      so poor they have to sleep on the street,
      he spoke consideringly: In India,
      they must have to drive very carefully.
      The darndest things, kids say. Anyway, I’ve
      gathered all the books, even one called
      Tips for Grieving. If there’re tips, how bad
      can it be? We’ve seen a therapist,
      cried openly at home, for days and nights
      cried in the car and on the
      sidewalk, behind our sunglasses. Tears in our
      ears from lying on our backs crying over
      him. The facilitator asks if we’d be
      interested in putting his name on an angel ornament
      for the organization’s annual Christmas tree.
      I say that sounds like a good idea. Later,
      I hold the snapshot of our child at four
      in sweater vest and seasonal plaid shirt,
      staunch little khakis,
      singing carols with his preschool class—
      all that earnest, cherubic abandon. The last thing
      either of us wants is his name on a tree
      decorated in memory of
      children no longer living.
      The truth is, what we want
      is irrelevant.
      The truth is
      the truth is irrelevant.
      That aside, this grief thing:
      we have this.

      from #60 - Summer 2018

      Anne Starling

      “When I was an eight-year-old wowed by Wordsworth and Rossetti, my father would intone Kipling’s verses. I appreciated his effort to relate to my interest in poetry. A Marine colonel who’d been in three wars, he once told me he still didn’t know what he wanted to be when he grew up. Poetry sustains me these days, perhaps because I’m so attached to the concept of true. (Truth sounds too large and overridingly, universally settled.) I tend to enjoy poems that express what’s true for the author, at the time. When I wrote ‘Compassionate Friends,’ I was in the very early, shocked stage of grief for our only child. There’s a hope in the poem that grief can be surmounted, bypassed, exorcised via stubborn—and stubbornly unacknowledged—denial, coupled with copious tears. The formula hasn’t worked, but poetry helps more often than it doesn’t.”

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