A wild write in response to “Poem Never To Be Read Aloud” by Dobby Gibson 

No words can tell us how to live. If we could taste the flavor of what we said, would we be more careful or be sweeter? If we must eat the words, would we be more generous or would we hold back? My mom has lost most of her words now, is losing her interest in food. It’s one of the signs of decline with dementia, people start to lose their sense of taste and can only experience things that are salty or sweet. The Facebook group for dementia caregivers I belong to has many posts from people worried about not being able to get their loved one with dementia to eat, or that they’ll only eat candy and other sweets. They ask for advice about getting them to eat more protein or vegetables. It reminds me so much of moms trying to get their toddlers to eat or the hyperfixation some kids go through where they’ll only eat chicken nuggets but they must be the ones shaped like dinosaurs, or like my friend’s daughter who went through a phase where no matter where we went to eat, she ordered a grilled cheese sandwich.  

Mom went through a phase not long after Dad died where she always wanted to know what was for dessert, always had a stain on her shirt from melted ice cream or chocolate. Now she eats eggs or yogurt or applesauce for breakfast, chips and apple slices for lunch, and not much of anything for dinner. It’s a weird place to be in – part of you worries, imagines ways to entice her to eat more, to get protein and vegetables in, a “balanced diet,” but then you remember that dementia is terminal.

If she lives long enough with it, she’ll lose her ability to chew or even swallow. Some caregivers at that stage opt for a feeding tube but to me that seems cruel. People with dementia are dying. There’s no other outcome, no other way it will end. If they want to eat ice cream and watch TV all day, why not let them? You can’t save them, can’t fix it, as hard as that is to accept. Make them comfortable, agree with whatever they want, and rejoice in the days they remember who you are, maybe even say your name. No words can tell us how to live anyway. 

 

A wild write in response to “While Everything Else Was Falling Apart” by Ada Limón 

Doing work but also none. Sometimes it’s doing the bare minimum to keep things moving – you walk the dog, feed the dog, let them out and call them back in, lean down and rub their ears, whisper to them in a language they only barely understand. Today you’ll water the plants, mostly because the peace lily is wilting. She’s always the first to ask for water, asks directly, helps you remember it is needed and when, except this time, today, is the second time she’s asked, the second time you give her what she needs, but the other plants are still waiting. You skipped them that last time, some days honestly forgetting but some days feeling like it was just too much to carry them one by one to the kitchen sink, to fill the watering can it took a while to find because Eric never puts it in the same place. There’s dinner to make and you want muffins, but the plants must get watered. Feed the dog, go to the grocery store, respond to that text.  

It can feel like working and some things get done, but the real work you don’t see. The effort it required to get out of bed, the way you have to trick yourself into brushing your teeth by believing that someone will die if you don’t, how hard you have to try to not think about that picture of your mom, no better than the one before – the lean to the side, no smile, the confused look in her eyes. It takes effort to not do things too, to not think about that picture, to not lie down on the couch, to not pick up your phone, to not eat the whole bag of sweet or salty, to not cross the street and set their flags on fire, to not cry in the grocery store, to not ram your car into a wall, to not check the news, to not rage and scream, to not be mad at the dog or take another nap. It’s cold and there’s still snow on the ground, but in just a few days it will be gone, replaced by either mud or dust.  

 

A wild write in response to “In The Noise and Whip of the Whirlwind” by Ama Codjoe 

The shape of my life – an animal made of soil and wearing bones. This morning it was walking around the ponds, the noise of the birds rising with the coming Spring – red winged blackbirds, a pair of northern flickers, doves, geese, ducks, and even a few seagulls crying and flying in circles overhead. I’m sure there were others, but those are the ones I’m certain of. Then at one point on the trail, on the side by the river, a single robin sitting fat on a bare branch. For me they are always a strong sign of spring coming. I was so excited one year to have a group of them visit my feeder, but the more I watched them, the more I realized how brutish they are. They made a mess – throwing the seeds and shitting everywhere – and they were mean to the other birds. It was disappointing, reminded me of that idea that you should never meet your heroes, that you will be disappointed.  

When we got back from our walk, there was a lone tiny chickadee in the bare branches of the maple tree, looking for the feeder that used to hang on my window. It fell and broke and I didn’t rush to replace it because that year’s generation of squirrels had figured out how to jump off the roof to the maple tree and then from those branches to the feeder – in fact, I suspect that’s why I found it on the ground one day, cracked and broken, the reason there’s no feeder there now. I wish I could figure out some way to feel them all – the birds, the crows in particular, and the squirrels, but the squirrels are greedy and fat, not satisfied by what food gets left in the compost pile. Anything else I put out, they want as well, won’t leave well enough alone. I get it, but I really need to feed the birds because it feeds me too, to watch them fly in and land, to eat.  

Nature can be brutal and somehow more than human, doesn’t follow the same standards of behavior we set for ourselves. It’s main concern is survival, and most lives are short and resources limited, and there’s not much time or need for anything more than that – find something to eat, get a mate, make a home and protect it, procreate, raise those babies, teach them what they need to survive and send them off into the world to do the same, repeat the cycle. Some sing and play as well, some fight and hunt each other, but as far as I can tell, none of them are getting a master’s degree or planning a family vacation or saving for retirement. It’s simpler that all that and infinitely more complicated.  

 

A wild write in response to “Haunts” by Danusha Laméris

My life feels like this poem – haunted. In any given moment, I’m here, solid and present, but I’m also living so many other moments, ghosts stacked upon ghosts. We live in this neighborhood, this town, and because it’s been 25 years, I can tell you the layers of any given place and what happened there – like how that apartment complex used to be a field with a tiny forest of trees in the center where we used to walk our dogs, or the house that was there before they scrapped the lot and built a new house three times as big or how that lot used to be covered in huge pine trees and there was a grotto in the back corner with a statue of the Virgin Mary, or how someone died on the couch in that house after a night at a party where he mixed heroin with the methadone he was already taking, or that apartment on the end across the street on the other side of the field is the one that burned, the one where she jumped out the window naked and covered in bleach with a broken jaw after he had raped and tried to kill her, how there used to be a cottonwood tree there and there and there, and how that garden used to be so full, how she’d planted it so there was something blooming all spring, summer, and fall, starting with the tiny yellow crocuses but how the new people have let it turn to mostly weeds. I can tell you about the ghost of a massive cottonwood that still stands guard over our house, or I can point out the places each dog lay as he died or what the bathroom looked like before we tore it out and replaced it. I can tell you about the bodies of a younger me and a younger Eric and how they fit together.

I live my life among the ghosts of all the life that came before and it’s getting really crowded, but also how lucky that is, to have lived and loved so many things that couldn’t be saved.  

 

A journal entry 

What do I even mean about not giving up? Because there are times and situations where you absolutely should, where your resistance to accepting defeat only generates more suffering. I suppose what I mean is the big, permanent, can’t take it back give up. The one where there’s no starting over, no beginning again, no trying, no more breath. Yes, surrender, change your mind, try a different approach, and for god’s sake REST – but don’t give up. Maybe that’s the same thing as hope for me. “This is terrible, keep going.”  

I told Eric that as upset as I got the last time Trump was in office, I just feel detached now, disassociated. Nothing surprises me and I’ve accepted that I can’t stop it AND I’m faced every day, when I look out my front window, with the proof that even my own neighbors are compliant. How do you “fight” that? You don’t. You “give up.” No more fighting. But I’m also not doom prepping, which sometimes seems like the only other choice, the only other option.  

I suppose what I’ve realized is no matter what, people like me will never change, no matter our environment or circumstances. We will continue to love, to be kind, to try and make you laugh, to feed you, to offer comfort, to find joy in the call of an owl or the first blooms of spring or other people’s dogs or the way you laugh. I will share all the poems. I will survive, until I don’t. I won’t give up. You could also say I’m too busy being human to have any energy to put towards such awfulness. Patsy died and I still can’t get my head around the fact I’ll never get to see her again. My mom is dying from dementia. My dad died as I watched, and I haven’t had a moment since to be able to sit with just that. 

I mean WTF do I care what that orange asshole demands? It doesn’t fundamentally change anything because those of us he can’t change or convince won’t give up. We’ll continue to reach out, to “run towards danger.” We’ll feed and house and educate and care for the babies you force to be born. We’ll clean oil off the birds caught in your carelessness. We will set the table with a feast and open the door while you obsess about building walls and locking people up. We’ll rally around those who are sick and displaced and do our best to help them. We’ll break into song when you move to silence us.  

We’ll read poetry over your graves. We’ll dismantle what you build and burn it in a fire that will keep the rest of us warm. There are things you cannot destroy, cannot stop, cannot change. We don’t give up and you can’t kill what is best about us, what is precious and sacred and magic. You can’t even find it, can’t see or touch it. You are the hungry ghosts. Your bellies will never be full, your thirst never satisfied. What you think will keep you warm and safe and satisfied will burn, taking you with it, and you, my friend, are no phoenix, and there will be no rising again. You are devoid of magic, of medicine. We make our own. Don’t ask us to save you. We’ll watch you burn and celebrate like we are watching fireworks on the 4th of July. Our rage and our grief are holy, a water that makes us unburnable but has the potential to drown you like that other holy flood.  

I don’t know if I’m writing a curse or a prayer. 

 

A journal entry 

I’m navigating the liminal space that exists between who you were before and who you’ll be after. When you lose people, your center shifts. You drive by your old house and it’s smaller than you remember, closer to the road. There are obvious changes – a new paint color, a whole second story that didn’t used to be there (wait, why do we call it a story?), and you don’t recognize any of the cars in the driveway. Where the garden used to be, someone has built an entire house, put in a yard where there used to be rows of berries and dirt. The shop is still there but all the black walnut trees that used to line the street are long gone. There are two new subdivisions on land that used to be fields of grass where we used to play. The creek with a massive oak tree growing out of it is gone. The fir tree seedling I planted in the 2nd grade, a gift from a forest service worker who visited our class, towers over everything. Somewhere in its deep roots are the remains of a hamster I buried having no idea my original hamster had already died and been replaced by my dad, a secret he only revealed decades later, sitting at the dining room table laughing about how gullible I was. The cherry and plum trees are gone, even though the maple tree I used to sit under on a blanket reading a book remains. I wonder if the pink rose bush tucked against the back corner of the house is still there. A bloom I pressed into the pages of a book when I left is now faded and brittle, the pink only remembered by me. The quail that came every year to have her babies, somehow knowing Dad would protect them from the neighborhood cats, is long gone.  

I’d never stop, knock, ask to come inside and look around because I know I wouldn’t recognize it, am sure the wood paneling is gone, the kitchen and bathroom surely updated, the entire space reconfigured. And there’s that whole second floor that used to be only sky. You can’t go back. Best case scenario, you won’t recognize anything and worst case, it’s gone entirely — from the land and maybe even from your memory. 

 

A journal entry 

Things are off kilter, off the rails in the world. I keep trying to tell myself this is samsara, this suffering, this running around in circles, this cycle of life, and it’s how it always is, but I can’t help but think there’s something particularly awful about this moment in time – the climate crisis, the genocide in Gaza and ongoing war in the Ukraine, the violence and suffering in other places too, a kind of violence that spreads like a virus or even cancer, that literally threatens the survival of the entire human race.  

Our government is a farce, full of grifters and criminals. If you were to “run towards the danger,” which way would you even go? It seems that as sick as we always were, there was a lean towards sanity, some tether that remained, some fundamental goodness. That doesn’t feel true anymore. We’ve gone from culture wars and disagreements over specifics to an all-out war, a fight for survival. And I’m in a place in my personal life where I have very little to offer in the way of help. My energy is tangled in grief and sorrow, smoke rising off the fire of my rage.

When I used to go to mediation retreats and we had days where we practiced silence, we’d wear a tag explaining that, so when we gathered in the dining hall, people would see that and respect it, leave you alone. I need a tag like that for grief, for rage. “I’m going through something. Please don’t talk to me.” It reminds me of that time I had to go to the grocery store after one of my dogs died, and there was a man in the parking lot who gave me a hard time for not smiling, not being nice. When I didn’t respond, he said something about how he felt sorry for whoever was waiting at home for me. We are all living our own version of a slow death, and we are afraid, shut down, in despair.  

 

A mantra for difficult times 

Stay tender. Keep your heart open. Don’t give up. Practice.