a poem of dedication

For today’s prompt, write a dedication poem. This is a poem dedicated to a person, an animal, or an organization. Or hey, objects work too — like a poem to a rock or paper bag. Put the dedication in the title or in a line under the title (“for Mother” or “to the heart-shaped rock between the creek and the tulips”). I dedicate today’s prompt to all of you! — Robert Lee Brewer, Writer’s Digest

To the giant hollow chocolate egg

You caught my eye —
the biggest chocolate Easter egg
I've ever seen.
Hollow, of course, my favorite.
Wrapped in shiny cellophane,
tied off with a satin bow,
calling out to me.

But too late;
I was already corralled
in the Marshall's & HomeGoods checkout line
with my shopping cart full of new flowerpots
for houseplant transplantation.
I had somewhere to go;
I would have to come back later.
Would you still be there?
My destiny?

Everyday life got in the way
and weeks — WEEKS! — passed
before I was able to return,
seeking you with trepidation.
Yet, joy! There you were, just waiting for me.
Nothing could separate us.

At last I was able to see you up close,
to hold you. So smooth, so heavy!
A full 3000 grams, almost 6 2/3 pounds.
So much Easter happiness!
Until I looked at your price tag.

O, chocolate egg.

I could not, would not
pay $80 for you.

(Epilogue: I bought myself a smaller version of the same egg. This is not such a sad story after all.)

lost and alone

For today’s prompt, write a lone poem. Perhaps the poem is about a solitary wanderer or person who just prefers to go it alone. Or a lone winner, lone wolf, or some other solo individual. Or alternatively, I’ll accept poems that are about loans or that are about being alone. — Robert Lee Brewer, Writer’s Digest

Lone

Bereavement is a solitary world
No one else is living your life
— even those who mourn the same loss

Some respond according to norms
While some are outliers
Some grieve ‘properly,’
and some are shunned
because their mourning makes other people uncomfortable.

Maybe you cry too much.
Say their name too much,
talk openly about what happened.
Don’t manage to ‘move on’ at an acceptable speed.
Continue to rage and rail.

Maybe you fail to return
to being the same person you were before
— how dare you not bounce back
from your whole life imploding?

People have been dying
since people have been.
Why are we so terrible at this?

How can we undergo an experience
that has happened or will happen
to every single person who ever has lived
— the loss of a loved one —
and still be alone?

i am for love

Time for our second Two for Tuesday of the month! Pick one prompt or use both … your choice!
1. Write a love poem. All you need is love.
2. Write an anti-love poem. Or not.
Remember: There are many forms of love: romantic love, friend and family love, love of being alive, etc. Also, here are some tips on how to write a love poem.
— Robert Lee Brewer, Writer’s Digest

I am for love

They say
that being a parent is like watching your heart walk around outside of your body.

They say
that grief is just love with nowhere to go.

I walk around
my heart filled up to overflowing
with love whose object
no longer walks with me.

They say
’tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.

They say
love never fails.

They say
love is love is love is love is love is love is love is love.

I have come up against it.
And I am for it. I am for love.

(Quotes from
Elizabeth Stone
Jamie Anderson
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
1 Corinthians 13:8
Lin-Manuel Miranda)

seven, eight

For today’s prompt, write a lucky number poem. Some people have lucky numbers, some don’t. Wherever you fall on the lucky number spectrum, you can still write a poem about the phenomenon of lucky numbers and/or luck in general.
— Robert Lee Brewer, Writer’s Digest

Calligraphy by Carol Chan

Fall down seven times; get up eight — Japanese proverb

Lucky number seven

When I read these words,
I feel a boost of courage

— my inner optimist
straightens her shoulders
and nods in recognition,
resolved, ready —

as if the deepest truth of the universe is that
all that is required of me
is to keep going.

“Try, try again.”
”Don’t give up.”

And I want to think
I will get up eight

But is it really that simple?
And how do we ever know
until we have fallen down seven?

celandine jealousy

For today’s prompt, write a jealous poem. Maybe you’re jealous. Or maybe someone else is jealous of you–or someone else. Whether envious of another or suspicious of a partner, dive deep into this emotion today. Remember: These prompts are just springboards; you have the freedom to jump in any direction you want.
— Robert Lee Brewer, Writer’s Digest

Stylophorum diphyllum (woodland or celandine poppy)

Jealousy

woodland poppies,

celandine,

bloomed where they were planted and then,

when we thought they may have failed to thrive,

showed themselves again but now

refuse to be contained,

stake their claim

shouting in bright yellow

across the forest floor.

I envy your boldness.

after ____

For today’s prompt, take the phrase “After (blank),” replace the blank with a word or phrase, make the new phrase the title of your poem, and then, write your poem. Possible titles include: “After Dinner,” “After You,” “After Hours,” and/or “After I Finish Writing This Poem.” — Robert Lee Brewer, senior content editor of the Writer’s Digest Writing Community

Aftermath

After the worst has happened?
Inconceivably, life carries on.

But an alternate life, a changed life.
In which (I have thought):
what is left to fear?
Why should I be concerned with what anyone thinks,
with keeping up appearances?
With laying bare my soul on the page?
Nothing left to lose.

Or is there?

I have lived "every parent's nightmare"

and after, still I dream

of flood,

of failure,

of things lost and left behind.

[Unfair
that surviving a real-life nightmare
fails to end
bad dreams of the ordinary sort.]

After?
Still fear.
And life.
And figuring out the balance.

Stealing/steeling

“For today’s prompt, write a stolen poem. And no, don’t steal anyone’s poem! But you can write about doing such a thing. Or stealing hearts, stealing time, stealing minds. Or steeling your mind (remember: I don’t care if you play on my original prompt). Steal away into a comfortable place to write and break some lines today.”

Robert Lee Brewer
Writer’s Digest Poem-A-Day Challenge prompt

Stolen

I find myself in a familiar position
as I inventory my emotions
and wrack my brain:
Where to begin?

Elbows on desk,
hands clasped to the sides of my bowed head,
fingers just touching,
I stare at the glossy wood grain mere inches away.

Where to begin?

As if the words will float up from the surface
and come to life in my mind
Steeling myself
for when poetic inspiration strikes

See here, the words come,
the lines unfurl,
the stanzas type themselves out
stolen from some secret storehouse.

out of a clear blue sky

Today’s Writer’s Digest poem-a-day writing prompt was to use the name of a painter as your title.

Blue Sky

All the times we were in Columbia
for football games
or driving through
from one side of the state to the other
we never made the effort to show you
at the corner of Taylor and Marion streets

Tunnel Vision

artist Blue Sky’s trompe l’oeil mural
covering the entire side of the old Ag First Building
a passage blasted through rock
to a brilliant sun setting over the ocean
neon-powered, glowing

You would have liked
the incongruity
of a tunnel to the sea
through the middle of a building
in a landlocked city.

We thought there’d be time.

poetry month poem a day: dogs

Today’s prompt was to write an animal poem.

Dogs

When my surviving child
went off to college
less than three months
after Rader's death blew up our nuclear family
at first we texted every day
at least some small thing
and then eventually I didn't need that
so much

It's been three, almost four semesters
and now
every few days
we send comics
and pictures of dogs

because dogs are good
and a very adequate shorthand
for "I love you."

worst case, best case

Day two of Poetry Month. There’s a two-for prompt on Tuesdays. Today’s was to write a worst case poem and/or a best case poem. When I got right down to it, my thoughts were simple. So I chose a concise format: haiku.

worst case haiku

Worst? Already was.
And the best that still could be?
Won't have you in it.

april is national poetry month

April is National Poetry Month. I’ve decided to try writing a poem a day using prompts from Writer’s Digest. If all goes well, I’ll share them here daily. If they’re too private (or unsuccessful — I think there was one poem last year I never did get to “work”), maybe not. The first prompt was to craft a morning/mourning poem.

Mourning Poem

Morning comes too early
my body says it's time to wake up.
Awake and waiting
I debate whether
to look at my watch.

I resist but usually in vain.
Like it or not, it's another day

That unfurls itself ahead of me
full of opportunities and demands.
Mostly I rise to them
not always cheerfully.

Faced with a fog, I fight against it
clouds my ambition
obscures my vision
makes it feel dangerous to go too far afield.

Every morning I wake up and
realize my loss anew.
Somehow the world
keeps spinning without you

And the time you were here
recedes farther and farther
into the past.
My mind can't make sense of how
that can be.

Morning to night,
it's always the same

seconds, minutes, hours, days

weeks, months

years tick by without you.

And every day,
another morning comes.

Too early.

"Little Panic" is a travelogue to the world of anxiety

Little Panic: Dispatches from an Anxious Life is a fascinating memoir. Amanda Stern takes you right into the extraordinary anxiety she experienced in very early childhood, and then interweaves chapters from her adulthood.

The book helped me gain a more well-rounded view of the ways anxiety presents itself and how we try, and sometimes fail, to manage it. Stern tells such an interesting story in such an engaging way, I think this book would be enjoyable even to someone who doesn't struggle with anxiety.

But if you are anxious, buckle your seatbelt. Stern holds nothing back.

I've never (yet) tried to write a memoir. There are a couple of parts I think would be particularly tricky. Number one is the timeline. If you decide that simple chronological order won't get the job done, figuring out a cohesive structure that doesn't confuse your reader is a hurdle. I've seen this done well, and I've seen it done poorly. Stern does it well.

The other chief obstacle, it seems to me, is letting go of your ego and telling the truth, however it might make you look. Stern masters this challenge as well. If you write a memoir that has the goal of making you out to be a hero in the end, savvy readers aren't going to buy in. People know when you're glossing over the ugly parts. Somehow, Amanda Stern — a perfectionist with a panic disorder — separated herself from the fear of what people were going to think of her and just laid it all out there.

I bought and read Little Panic after coming across Stern's blog post "Is Perfectionism Anxiety in Disguise?" She wrote it as a guest blogger for mental health website Bring Change to Mind. The headline grabbed me.

I'm a recovering perfectionist, but not being prone to panic attacks or freezing up in social situations (awkwardness aside), "anxious" is not really a way I'd describe myself. The article skewered me, though, and I had to admit she was on to something.

I did not read this book and suddenly discover that I, too, have a panic disorder. I don't. But I did recognize some of the destructive thought patterns, and the sound of that voice in your head that (surprise!) doesn't always have your best interests at heart. As the parent of two kids who struggled with anxiety that at times interfered with being able to live their lives the way they wanted to — one of whom then died by suicide — the book gave me a lot to think on.

I recommend Little Panic. In my research, I discovered it got the Brain Pickings treatment last year when it was released, a wholly different kind of book review than I've provided here; be sure to check it out. The perfectionism article and panic book are the first of Stern's I've read, but there are a lot more options, and I look forward to wading in!

Trautwein's "My Living Will" an excellent read for all parents of teens

John Trautwein and I haven't met, but we are members of the same club. It's a club neither one of us wants to belong to, which he refers to in his memoir — My Living Will: A Father's Story of Loss & Hope — as "the saddest club on earth." We are parents who have lost a child to suicide. 

I don't remember where I heard about Trautwein's book, but it could have been on the Families for Depression Awareness website; it's on their books and memoirs list. Mustering the concentration to read in a state of grief is difficult; reading about suicide is difficult; so it took me a while to get through this book. I bought the Kindle edition months ago, and started it a couple of times. This week we were traveling for spring break, so I had more free time than usual, and therefore was finally able to read it start to finish in a couple of days. 

My Living Will is a well-written, heart-rending story. The Trautweins lost their 15-year-old son, Will, suddenly in 2010. There were no signs he was struggling with anything as intense as suicidal ideation. He left behind his bewildered parents, two younger brothers, and a little sister. You can feel their pain from the way Trautwein shares the before and the agonizing after.

John Trautwein clearly is an optimist by nature, as I am. I could relate to the way he was driven to learn all the lessons he could in the wake of Will's death, and how he made specific choices to take action rather than turn his grief inward. He formed a nonprofit, the Will To Live Foundation, "dedicated to preventing teen suicide by improving the lives and the ‘will to live’ of teenagers everywhere through education about mental health and encouraging them to recognize the love and hope that exists in each other." There's much to say about the excellent work the foundation is doing, but for now I will focus on reviewing the book.

Trautwein's writing style is approachable, conversational, as if he is telling you his story aloud. He's a sought-after inspirational speaker, and he sounds like it. A former professional athlete and lifelong team player and coach, he uses a lot of sports analogies. But even though I had no childhood sports team experience and arrived at an athletic lifestyle much later, I could still understand where he was coming from. He also tells the story from a Christian-specific perspective, but again, it's easy to relate to even if you're not religious. 

My Living Will is published by WestBow Press, a self-publishing division of Christian publishers Thomas Nelson & Zondervan. It's a shame they didn't offer Mr. Trautwein a little more copy-editing and proofreading support. There are a few more errors than you'd typically find in a traditionally published book, but those small mistakes did not detract much from an otherwise excellent read. 

I recommend My Living Will to anyone who has lost a loved one, especially a teenager, to suicide. I highlighted passages throughout the book when things Trautwein said moved, inspired, or just resonated with me. I'll go back and reflect upon those sections as I continue to think about teen suicide and its causes, what we can do to prevent it, how to move forward as a grieving parent, how to look to our communities to get our needs met, and a dozen other topics well worthy of contemplation and action. 

And if you're lucky enough not to be a member of the saddest club on earth, there are still a lot of reasons to read My Living Will. You might learn something that will open the door for you to help someone else who, like Will, or Rader, may be struggling in silence. Especially if you have teenagers, take the time to read this book, and then talk with them about it. It could even be the difference between life and death.

unimaginable

"I went through hell, and saw there love's raging fire."
― Hazrat Inayat Khan, The Dance of the Soul

"There are moments that the words don’t reach;
There is suffering too terrible to name."
— Lin-Manuel Miranda, It's Quiet Uptown (from Hamilton)

We saw the Broadway musical Hamilton again this weekend. We first saw it with our kids for the older one’s high-school-senior-year spring break in 2017. We spent the week in Chicago, specifically to see Wayne Brady, a family favorite, in his limited engagement in the role of Aaron Burr. It was a phenomenal show, a great week, a fun family time. Two months later, Rader was dead. At some point within those first few days without him, I recalled "It's Quiet Uptown," the song in the musical that follows the death of Alexander and Eliza Hamilton's son, Philip. One day I listened to it on repeat as I walked the streets of our neighborhood, too restless to stay at home (much like Alexander Hamilton does in the song). When I returned, I played "It's Quiet Uptown" for my husband and our friends Doyle and Mia, who had come to be with us in our grief, and we clung to each other and sobbed together.

My husband and I had the chance to see the show again in Chicago in March of this year, with our friends Jim and Kristen. This time we knew the song was coming, three quarters of the way through the second act. We braced ourselves as Philip dies onstage, his parents looking on in anguish as the heartbeat accompaniment that's been keeping time during the song "Blow Us All Away" falls silent. William and I held hands and cried with each other as the now-familiar opening bars of "It's Quiet Uptown" began.

Now one of the Hamilton tours has come to our town for two weeks, and because we purchased the season ticket package to the Broadway shows that tour through our performing arts center, we were lucky enough to see it a third time — this time as a family of three, without Rader. As I knew it would, "It's Quiet Uptown" cut right through me. And the tears fell as this time I clasped the hand of my surviving child.

There are moments that the words don’t reach
There is suffering too terrible to name
You hold your child as tight as you can
And push away the unimaginable
The moments when you’re in so deep
It feels easier to just swim down

The Hamiltons move uptown
And learn to live with the unimaginable

How can Lin-Manuel Miranda know how it feels to lose a child? His first wasn't even born until shortly before the show opened off Broadway. But I clung to that word, "unimaginable," because it was. It IS. They learned to live with it. We learn to live with it.

At the end of the song, he comes back around to the beginning lyrics, with some changes in perspective.

There are moments that the words don’t reach
There is a grace too powerful to name
We push away what we can never understand
We push away the unimaginable

I believe in that grace too powerful to name — not in a religious sense, but more universal. There is terrible suffering, and powerful grace, and neither can be adequately expressed just with words. But my heart is going to keep trying to say what it has to say, and I'll keep trying my best with the words I have available. And sometimes I'll live with, and sometimes push away, the unimaginable.

Provided to YouTube by Warner Music Group It's Quiet Uptown · Renée Elise Goldsberry · Lin-Manuel Miranda · Phillipa Soo · Original Broadway Cast of Hamilton Hamilton ℗ 2015 Hamilton Uptown, LLC under exclusive license to Atlantic Recording Corporation Producer: Ahmir Thompson Conductor, Keyboards, Producer: Alex Lacamoire Orchestration: Alex Lacamoire

ashes

Today's prompt is the anti-metaphor, pushing back against images of the beautiful transformational power of grief. The barren trees budding out again in spring. The butterfly emerging from the cocoon.

"I am not your _____." Thinking of a metaphor to argue against, rejecting several, I then come upon a phoenix. I consider it rising from the ashes to begin life anew. I think of ashes. I think of Rader's ashes. Yesterday I wrote about Mt. St. Helens. I think of Mt. St. Helens' ashes.

I am not your verdant mountain, lovely again after decades of recovery and regrowth. I am not new life sprung from tephra, avalanche lilies pushing up through the blast deposits. I am not a phoenix born from ashes.

No life comes from the ashes. They lie inert, in a wooden box shrouded in a reusable bag that bears the name and logo of the funeral home we chose when Rader died — a bag that looks as if perhaps under other circumstances I would carry it grocery shopping. Those ashes represent, no, they are, a life extinguished.

I found a CBS News article from 2015 with the headline: "35 years after Mount St. Helens eruption, nature returns". Nature will not return to the ashes in that box. Neither will I rise to new life with the passing of time. I am not your volcano, recovered.

suicide is a volcano

Today’s writing prompt referenced Mt. St. Helens, about which Megan Devine wrote: “Whole lives that could have been, that should have been, that were, have been disappeared. Not just the life of the one you love, but also your life: that life that could have been.”
 

It feels impossible for me to respond to a prompt that references Mt. St. Helens without saying I was there, close enough to hear the eruption on that Sunday morning in May of 1980. I was 10 years old, living in Federal Way, Washington, just under 80 miles away. Until this prompt, I hadn't thought about that event in relation to my life now, to my loss.

I remember, and I still have the newspaper clippings from the Seattle Times and the Oregonian, and the official slide show from the Department of Natural Resources, Division of Geology.

I suppose a suicide is like a volcano, except with St. Helens there was more warning. The rumblings were louder. The eruption was imminent and people knew it. The north slope of the mountain was there, and then literally all of a sudden it was gone. The sound could be heard for hundreds of miles. The ash rained down on eleven states. The mountain itself was instantly a lifeless wasteland.

The image I remember best is a forest of of stripped trees blasted flat to the gray ground. The color photo looks like a black-and-white shot of hundreds of spilled matchsticks. It's inconceivable. I remember waking up in that same landscape in early grief. Everything was covered in a thick layer of colorless ash. My life was unrecognizable, and the center of it was blown completely away.

I read something interesting about the sound of the blast. Yes, we heard it from miles distant. Yet some of those at the site reported they heard nothing at all. In a Stylus Radio report from WBUR, I found the following:

Many of the people on or near Mount St. Helens that day were geologists, who had been monitoring the mountain over the past couple months as it shook with smaller quakes. The U.S. Geological Survey had issued an official Hazard Watch and closed the mountain to the general public. But still some thrill seekers came in search of adventure, and were there on the day of the blast. One account comes from one of these thrill seekers, Terry Clayton. Note that this is his description of the blast itself, not the aftermath.

“Something didn’t feel right, though I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was. Then it dawned on me. It was absolutely quiet. There was no twittering of birds or scurrying of chipmunks or other soft sounds that are usually in the background. I heard Pam gasp, then cry out, ‘My God, the mountain has blown!’

“At that catastrophic moment the energy equivalent of 24 megatons of thermal energy was released. Though the sound of that explosion was heard all the way to Canada, for us there was no sound at all. Similar phenomena have been reported on battlefields of the Civil War and World War One. Somehow the sound gets cancelled out for those at the epicenter.”

That last line speaks to me, in this life after life, thinking back to that moment of utter destruction: Somehow the sound gets cancelled out for those at the epicenter. Suicide is a volcano.

Photo by USGS in an article from The Atlantic

solace

Last Wednesday, the writing prompt was about solace. The prompt from Megan Devine quoted poet David Whyte, and something about the subject 'raised her emotional hackles,' she explained. It was late in the day when I sat down to write, and frankly her introduction scared me off. I didn't even read the paragraphs from David Whyte. I decided I'd tackle the topic over the weekend.

In the meantime, I thought about solace. What did it really mean? I let the concept roll around inside my head. I determined that when I got ready to write about it, I'd look it up, check my idea of it against the dictionary definition. To me, solace was a kind of comfort, but it had a "despite this, there's that" quality to it, a consolation. It held within it something of the dreaded "at least"s — the kinds of things silver-lining people say to you in the midst of tragedy. A death after a long illness: at least he's not suffering anymore. A miscarriage: at least you can try again. The loss of a child: at least you have another one still alive. (This idea is explored beautifully in Brené Brown's short animated video on empathy.)

What is the best way to ease someone's pain and suffering? In this beautifully animated RSA Short, Dr Brené Brown reminds us that we can only create a genuine empathic connection if we are brave enough to really get in touch with our own fragilities.

The dictionary definition backed me up. It even used the same word, consolation. Then I couldn't help but think about a consolation prize. "You lose, but here. Have this."

And so I went ahead and read the excerpt from the David Whyte. I get why Megan is provoked by him saying that if we can stand in loss and not be overwhelmed, *then* "we become useful and generous and compassionate and even more amusing [really?] companions for others." I, too, buck against the idea that I have to meet a specific threshold — stand and not be overwhelmed — to fulfill the role of being useful.

He says solace is "the art of asking the beautiful question." What is that question in my situation? Is it "Why am I here?" Is it "What am I supposed to do now?" No. I reject the idea that there is a "supposed to." I don't believe there's a script I should be following, don't believe in fate or destiny or a divine plan for me. I like better, "So what do I do now?" No trying to meet expectations. Just the simple question, "What's next?"

I don't want consolation. That is, I suppose, I don't want to be in a position to *need* consolation. And yet here I am. Raging against solace as a concept, yet grateful for any comfort I can find in it, even in the "at least"s. "Solace is not meant to be an answer, but an invitation," he writes. I suppose I'll take it. I haven't got any better offers.

leaves

Today's prompt was a poem by William Carlos Williams, "The Widow's Lament in Springtime." It included a lot of nature imagery along with a sense of inability to be moved by the beauty of it. I can relate to that.

-----

I started watching for the leaves to change

noticed the days getting shorter

but then forgot the leaves

until they looked all afire

as I drove down the highway

one day all green

and burning yellow the next it seemed

As if they transformed suddenly

but really I just opened my eyes

taking my surviving child

back to college after Thanksgiving

long enough to notice them

and then returned to forgetting

There's a red carpet of

Japanese maple leaves

from the tree by the driveway

Aren't those leaves usually green

in the autumn before they fall?

I check the year-long research booklets

my kids made in Montessori second grade,

studying that tree when each was age seven —

my older child, my survivor, in 2006-2007,

my younger, now gone, 2008-2009 —

and yes, they reported the leaves were red when they were spring-new

and lost coloring through the summer and fall.

Each seasonal photo of kid with tree for proof.

We took note because it was opposite of all the other trees.

I wonder why they're still red this year?

Some ratio of rain and cold

of temperature and time

I study each of the photos in the booklets

seeking the secrets of life.

A late hard frost in 2007. A doubling in height by 2009.

Rader's end-of-year conclusion:

"I am glad the tree is in my front yard, so that even though

I am finished with my observations for this book,

I can still watch it grow."

I can still watch it grow.

redemption

[Today's theme is the redemption arc.]

Let me call your attention to a destructive line of thinking. You may have heard it applied to a variety of scenarios and expressed in a couple of different ways. For example, does this sound familiar? "Special kids are given to special parents." Ugh, so common in the disability community. How about this one? "This (tragedy or loss) occurred so you could 'become your best self' or 'grow as a person.'"

That's right, I'm talking about "everything happens for a reason" — the redemptive storyline. I'm intimately familiar with this storyline because I've been redeemed myself, but not in the way you think. I'm in recovery from a lifetime of belief that 'events unfold the way they should,' and 'good things will come of it' (whatever 'it' is). I was always a silver lining person.

Truth be told, I'm still a silver lining person. I love to see something good develop. Who doesn't? But the difference is now I know how hurtful it is to claim there's divine design behind disasters. Here, I'm going to throw in another incredibly unhelpful variation on this theme: "God won't give you more than you can handle." (You may have thought that one came from the Bible. Surprise! It's not in there.)

You know what? Things do happen. My 15-year-old son died by suicide. Are you really going to tell me a benevolent god looked at me and said, "Yeah, she's got this!" Oh, please. Yes, tragedies occur — or losses, or challenges — in the lives of all sorts of people. And maybe what feeds this narrative is, most of us rise to them. Because what choice do we really have? And who wants to take up residence in the worst place life has ever brought you?

I am only speaking for myself here. I know others also seem "strong" or "brave" or "inspiring" in the face of tragedy, but they have their own stories to tell. The reasons I do the work of the Rader Ward Foundation are varied. But yes, of course I want to try to do some good. I don't want other parents to have to figure out how to go on after a child's suicide. I don't want anyone to struggle with their mental health and not know what resources are available. I don't want bereaved people in this society that doesn't do grief well to continue to feel isolated and vilified. Yes I am trying to create some good in the world after what's commonly called "a parent's worst nightmare" became reality in my life. Obviously I don't want Rader's death to be "in vain." NONE of that means he should have died so this good would come from it. Or so that, god forbid, as a writer I'd finally have something important to say.

The redemption narrative may make for happy endings in the movies, but it wreaks a lot of havoc in real life. Next time you're in a position to offer comfort to someone suffering a tragedy, challenge, or loss, please keep the platitudes to yourself. Don't tell them it's all for the good or that this is how it was meant to be. Instead, say you care for them and you're there to listen.

P.S. My writer friend Maureen is mom to a child who has Down syndrome. I read this article of hers years ago, and it really stuck with me. In fact when you read it, you can see the influence it had on my thinking. I went back and found the piece after I finished writing to this prompt, and surprised myself with the parallels! Also let me state explicitly that I don't believe having a child with differing abilities is a tragedy. But it's shocking how much overlap there is in the way people tend to react to my situation and hers.

will you say when I'm gone

Our prompt for this day was a song, Each Coming Night, from the album Our Endless Numbered Days, by Iron & Wine. One suggestion for writing was to take the existing structure of the lyrics as poetry and ‘weave in your own people and phrases.’ This is the approach I chose. So for the first four stanzas, the first lines are exactly the same as in the song. The rest of it is original.

Will you say when I'm gone away 
"My son was here but he couldn't stay." 
The world was not enough to hold you. 
You escaped its grasp and left me 
gasping on the ground as you ascended.

Will you say to them when I'm gone 
"Your grandson's understanding 
was both beyond his years 
and not at all 
and would not reconcile 
did not compute 
could not go on."

Will you say when I'm gone away 
"Your brother was out of sync with time." 
He didn't see 
how who he was 
belonged here. 
He didn't know — as you, my surviving child, know — 
he and the world 
would grow 
and that he'd see the light of day.

Will you say to me when I'm gone 
"You live on." 
In the games you played 
and those you created 
in the things you loved to do 
and the people who love you.

Not you, though, living — 
but a shadow, an outline 
a fading sketch, an echo.

What will I say? 
You are gone too soon 
a death "out of order" 
that shuts everything down.

I've walked through the wrong door 
nothing looks the way it should 
this is not my life 
this is not my life 
this is not my life.