Last week, I worked on my grandmother’s obituary with…my grandmother. She dictated in what order she wanted items to appear and which items were to be included. M. called me, asked how I was, and I said, “well, I’m writing an obituary this morning.” It was surreal.

I thought I would have the whole obituary written, but that grief thing keeps getting in the way. I can’t quite bring myself to do it. We have time, I keep telling myself.

However, all of that does not stop the overwhelming sadness. It’s not just the dying. It was the horrible bedside manner of the doctor. When my grandmother asked, “what are you going to do for me?” He replied, “not much.” Thanks, doc. That was good.

In movies, the dying person says their loving last words and conveniently stops breathing. We said our loving last words nearly every night for a week. Everyone, including my grandmother, thought she would not make it until the next day. Then, my grandmother would ask, “when will I get out of here?” We did not know if she would rally one more time or not. After all this woman survived breast cancer about 40 years ago. Even two years ago, at age 100, she came back after everyone was sure she would die. She heard people saying she was going to die, got mad, and fought to come back.

She’d call us every morning at 7 am to tell us to bring vitamins, bring her sleeping pills, bring her aspirin.

One night, our hearts broke even more. We left the hospital at 10. She’d been uncomfortable for more than 2 hours and then finally fell asleep. When she was uncomfortable, that meant I stood by her bedside for 45 minutes adjusting pillows. When the bones are nearly sticking out through the skin, there’s not much comfort to be found despite the air mattress, regular mattress, extra pads and pillows. When she fell asleep that night, we decided not to wake her since she was peaceful. She called and said, “why didn’t you say goodnight to me? I waited and waited for you to come back.” I wanted to throw up.

“It is good to have a reminder of death before us, for it helps us to understand the impermanence of life on this earth, and this understanding may aid us in preparing for our own death.”

Black Elk
Oglala Sioux

My sister points out that this reminder of death also helps us better prepare for our life going forward.

No one knows where the Spirit World is.
The ancient people said that it is beyond the pines.
The pine trees are at the edge of the world,
and beyond them is the path of the winds.
The Spirit Way begins there at the edge of the world
among the stars, and the winds will tell the spirits of people where to find it.

What is Life?
It is the flash of a firefly in the night.
It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime.
It is the little shadow that runs across the grass
and loses itself in the sunset.

Paul Goble
Beyond The Ridge Plains
Indian Tradition
Bradbury Press, 1989

This video mentions how new cars contain devices that record what happens just before or after a crash. The device will know how fast you were going at the time of impact and whether you braked.

Your cell phone — when on — tracks everywhere you go and that information is stored by the cell phone company.

Cameras in stores watch customers to determine marketing strategies.

Your Google searches are saved and your IP address recorded. Ever searched for something embarassing? Well, Google knows.

If you want to search Google anonymously, you can. Thanks to Lifehacker for this.

Dear Mrs. Bush,

I am writing to let you know why I am not able to accept your kind invitation to give a presentation at the National Book Festival on September 24, or to attend your dinner at the Library of Congress or the breakfast at the White House.

In one way, it’s a very appealing invitation. The idea of speaking at a festival attended by 85,000 people is inspiring! The possibility of finding new readers is exciting for a poet in personal terms, and in terms of the desire that poetry serve its constituents–all of us who need the pleasure, and the inner and outer news, it delivers. And the concept of a community of readers and writers has long been dear to my heart.

As a professor of creative writing in the graduate school of a major university, I have had the chance to be a part of some magnificent outreach writing workshops in which our students have become teachers. Over the years, they have taught in a variety of settings: a women’s prison, several New York City public high schools, an oncology ward for children. Our initial program, at a 900-bed state hospital for the severely physically challenged, has been running now for twenty years, creating along the way lasting friendships between young MFA candidates and their students–long-term residents at the hospital who, in their humor, courage and wisdom, become our teachers.

When you have witnessed someone non-speaking and almost non-moving spell out, with a toe, on a big plastic alphabet chart, letter by letter, his new poem, you have experienced, close up, the passion and essentialness of writing.

When you have held up a small cardboard alphabet card for a writer who is completely non-speaking and non-moving (except for the eyes), and pointed first to the A, then the B, then C, then D, until you get to the first letter of the first word of the first line of the poem she has been composing in her head all week, and she lifts her eyes when that letter is touched to say yes, you feel with a fresh immediacy the human drive for creation, self-expression, accuracy, honesty and wit–and the importance of writing, which celebrates the value of each person’s unique story and song.

So the prospect of a festival of books seemed wonderful to me. I thought of the opportunity to talk about how to start up an outreach program. I thought of the chance to sell some books, sign some books and meet some of the citizens of Washington, DC. I thought that I could try to find a way, even as your guest, with respect, to speak about my deep feeling that we should not have invaded Iraq, and to declare my belief that the wish to invade another culture and another country–with the resultant loss of life and limb for our brave soldiers, and for the noncombatants in their home terrain–did not come out of our democracy but was instead a decision made “at the top” and forced on the people by distorted language, and by untruths. I hoped to express the fear that we have begun to live in the shadows of tyranny and religious chauvinism–the opposites of the liberty, tolerance and diversity our nation aspires to.

I tried to see my way clear to attend the festival in order to bear witness–as an American who loves her country and its principles and its writing–against this undeclared and devastating war.

But I could not face the idea of breaking bread with you. I knew that if I sat down to eat with you, it would feel to me as if I were condoning what I see to be the wild, highhanded actions of the Bush Administration.

What kept coming to the fore of my mind was that I would be taking food from the hand of the First Lady who represents the Administration that unleashed this war and that wills its continuation, even to the extent of permitting “extraordinary rendition”: flying people to other countries where they will be tortured for us.

So many Americans who had felt pride in our country now feel anguish and shame, for the current regime of blood, wounds and fire. I thought of the clean linens at your table, the shining knives and the flames of the candles, and I could not stomach it.

Sincerely,

SHARON OLDS

I read it because I have a husband and a daughter.

Grief.

I finished the book quickly. Reading it was painful. I wanted it to be over. The writing was beautiful, and I still wanted it to be over.

She used short sentences. These short sentences of hers were more painful than longer ones.

You could tell she led the life of a highly educated woman — trips to Honolulu, New York, LA and so on — on a regular basis. Homes in Brentwood, Malibu and the UWS or UES. She attended Berkeley. Her husband attended Princeton. Money rarely seemed to be an issue. When it was, they flew to Honolulu or Paris anyway.

While I read the book, I could not help but think of her life and how easy it would seem in comparison to people with less.

However, she is telling her own story and not someone else’s. She went to those places and had that life.

This is the second book I’ve read in the past year that honors the dead spouse of the writer. When I wrote “honors,” I wanted to use a word that meant something about memory. I did not want to use the word “discusses” and the right word seemed important. The book honors the person and shares the experience of grief.

If I tell my friends about this great book, many will shy away from the grief and sadness.

One of my friends read it and wondered why she did that to herself when her own mother is dying.

Didion’s grief and experience of grief and mourning shows up in every word as she recounts medical files, shares bits of computer documents, and includes passages from medical texts.

Like many writers — are you like this? — she researches endlessly to find out more. Was he dead when he collapsed at the table? Could she have stopped it? She notes that the high achievers in her life, including herself, think they can conquer the uncontrollable with the right phone call or pulling of strings.

She wonders when her husband actually died.

After looking up “lividity” in a medical textbook, she calculates her husband died immediately.

From wikipedia, lividity is:

a settling of the blood in the lower (dependent) portion of the body, causing a purplish red discoloration of the skin: when the heart is no longer agitating the blood, heavy red blood cells sink through the serum by action of gravity. This discoloration does not occur in the areas of the body that are in contact with the ground or another object, as the capillaries are compressed.

Coroners can use the presence or absence of livor mortis as a means of determining an approximate time of death.

By the time her husband was brought the hospital, lividity indicated he’d been dead about one hour.

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Could this book have been written years ago?

On a poet mother listserv, it was discussed that women did not write of children, birthing times, and “women” events before the confessionalists. Only in more recent memory have women written of these events.

I will now mix up poetry and prose.

We have Alice by Calvin Trillin and The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. Would these books have existed before 1945? Would they have been allowed to exist? Would anyone — man or woman — be “allowed” to discuss the intimacies of grief and mourning before the world was prepared for it by the likes of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton and many others.

If you know of prose examples from before 1945, please share them with me in the comments below.

The ‘tea bag wisdom’ on my Yogi tea said that bliss is a state no matter if life goes well or bad. We were maybe going to move. Life changed directions and decided to keep us here. Let’s just say some amazing and wonderful things happened, and we decided to stay. =) I’d been feeling extremely happy to have it all settled when I drank my tea and read that ‘tea wisdom’ on the tea bag tag.

Sure, it’s easy to be in a state of bliss when fortune shines down and life goes a way that makes sense. What about those other times? One little cup of tea later, and I wondered about being blissful when not-so-great things are happening.

Like right now.

Something might happen that is not so great at first glance. Sometimes these not-so-great events end up turning life on its head and taking me in enexpected, and eventually adored, directions. I’m at a point where I am not wanting to take action. I am waiting to see where certain events conspire to lead me. Again, scary and exciting.

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Sandra Beasley tagged me with this meme:

“Here are five poetry collections you may not have read but certainly must. (Note: The collections, for whatever reason, should be a bit off the beaten path. And need not have caused the earth to open and swallow you whole.)”

This is my third choice out of the five. Resin by Geri Doran. She’s a friend and a good poet.

Thanks to Collin for pointing out this video.

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At first, I was one of the people asking how two hours could go by before the school gets closed down. DH started asking me the hard questions about the situation, and I had to reconsider my original thoughts. What would you do if there was a shooting at the coffee shop near campus? Would you close down the school? In DC, Howard University or Gallaudet would probably be shut down a regular basis.

It’s easy to sit here from the relative safety of my home and make judgments and say that men should have been more brave (as one blogger stated) or that the president should have shut the whole school down after the first shooting or that someone should have put the gunman into a mental hospital against his will.

I’m in agreement with these words from Collin:

[This] is just a society that has become numb, or too busy or too scared to do anything about the mentally ill. That lack of attention is what causes tragic events like what happened in Blacksburg on Monday.”