"There Are Sorrows Much Keener than These"

The Blue Bowl 

BY JANE KENYON

Like primitives we buried the cat

with his bowl. Bare-handed

we scraped sand and gravel

back into the hole. It fell with a hiss

and thud on his side,

on his long red fur, the white feathers

that grew between his toes, and his

long, not to say aquiline, nose.

We stood and brushed each other off.

There are sorrows much keener than these.

Silent the rest of the day, we worked,

ate, stared, and slept. It stormed

all night; now it clears, and a robin

burbles from a dripping bush

like the neighbor who means well

but always says the wrong thing.

--Jane Kenyon, "The Blue Bowl" from Collected Poems. Copyright © 2005 by the Estate of Jane Kenyon. 

(With thanks to my long-ago UI poetry professor, Michael Van Walleghen, who introduced me to the work of Jane Kenyon.  I will be eternally grateful.)

We buried the guinea pig today, not with her bowl but with a carrot and a black-eyed Susan, for no one should travel to the afterlife without food and something beautiful.  She was an elderly and ailing piggy and we chose her death for her, which, even when right, is never an easy thing to do.  It never should be an easy thing to do, and it’s not a responsibility I take lightly.  But given her age (great, for a guinea pig) and her condition (poor), I thought I would have more peace than I had in making this choice.  I am an emotional person at the best of times but my response to this sad event has seemed out of proportion, even for me.  Don’t get me wrong, I mourn all of our beloved pets when they leave, but this feels--different.  Sometimes letting go of a guinea pig is more than just letting go of a guinea pig.

For the last eight years, I have been mentally writing an ongoing eulogy, steeling myself step by step to say goodbye to someone who is my heart.  It does something to you, something that feels irreparable, living with incomplete mourning day in and day out for eight years.  In recent times, I’ve almost forgotten what it was like before that diagnosis that sent our world crumbling down.  I wish I had appreciated it more when it was good.  I spent a lot of time in denial and even more in a state of paralysis.

I closed all the windows.  I battened down the hatches.  I knew a storm was coming and I shut down as an act of self-protection.  But the storm seeped through my pores and went underground.  There’s a river of pain flowing under my surface.  It is deep and it is wide.  Smaller losses, like a guinea pig death, crack open the ground above and send fissures running down to that river.  The river rushes up and out and floods, and then it recedes.  But it’s always right there, just below the veneer of okay-ness that I have constructed on top of it.

A lot of people have this river inside them.  I don’t know if this river will ever dry up and go away.  I don’t even know if that’s what I want it to do.

I wrote a really depressing poem about all of this today that I want to share with all of you, because I’m generous that way.  Today I don’t want to hear that it will all be OK or that God has a plan or that my endurance of my pain somehow makes me a saint.  Today I just need to feel it, to let the current carry me.  Tomorrow, maybe, the floods will subside.

Everything we ever love, we lose.

Ponyboy and Robert Frost were right,

Gold can’t stay, it all dissolves to rust.

Everyone we love will turn to dust.

We strain to hold back time, we dodge, distract;

Though shadows may be slowed, they never cease,

They dog our steps, they always readjust.

Everyone we love will turn to dust.

Sometimes the loss is sudden, sometimes slow:

A drip of water wears away a stone.

Slow shredding of a heart, or single thrust--

Everyone we love will turn to dust.

So many do not get what they deserve,

So many pay more than they ever owed.

It rains upon the just and the unjust;

Everyone we love will turn to dust.

The smaller losses magnify the large,

Remind us that there’s greater pain in store,

But walk embracing life and death we must:

Everyone we love will turn to dust.

I Want to Be the Person Mr. Rogers Thought I Was

http://focusfeatures.com/wont-you-be-my-neighbor/

I just saw Morgan Neville’s powerful documentary, “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” and I can’t encourage you strongly enough to go see it.  It’s a beautifully made film, both reverent and humanizing in its treatment of its remarkable subject, and I came away wanting to see it again (and maybe even to take notes the second time around).  Don’t wait until it comes out on DVD or Netflix—go see it in the theater.  First of all, by doing so you demonstrate that a movie like this can be a commercial box office success.  Secondly, it’s a unifying experience to see it as part of a community, and don’t we all need that right now?  I have never in my life heard or seen so many people, including myself, continuously crying at a movie.  I can think of few films—maybe “Schindler’s List?”—that have so moved an audience of which I was a part.

Fred Rogers was a lifelong Republican, did insist that his friend and co-star Francois Clemmons stay “in the closet” while on the show, and was far more censorious of media produced for kids than I am, but despite those differences l feel a strong kinship to him and to his work.  As an adult, and particularly as a parent and a teacher, I have found myself moved to tears by his shows and his words.  He so beautifully and humbly modeled what it looks like to truly respect young children, and sincerely demonstrated the words grace and mercy in his repeated affirmations of unconditional love for all of us collectively and individually.  I enjoyed his shows as a child but did not fully appreciate him or what he was trying to do; by middle school I thought he was ridiculous.  But whenever I was sick at home as a teenager, I would almost always watch his show (along with “Sesame Street” and Bob Ross’s “The Joy of Painting”).  Whether I admitted it or not, Mr. Rogers was security.  Mr. Rogers made me feel better.

As I watched the film, the clips of Mr. Rogers as puppeteer were some of the most moving to me.  My Simon the snail puppet is my Daniel Tiger, as is my daughter’s stuffed Piglet, which I used to make talk to her (OK, I still do this).  I was a kid who favored my stuffed animals above all other toys, and, while I was always a little scared of Lady Elaine and wasn’t a huge fan of the royal family puppets, X the owl, Daniel, and Henrietta Pussycat seemed like friends.  As a somewhat fearful, risk-averse child, I especially connected with Henrietta.  In the same way that certain smells can immediately conjure emotional memory, hearing Henrietta’s and Daniel’s voices and seeing them on the big screen instantly transported me back to my childhood, safe and warm in my living room. 

As my friend and I left the movie theater this evening, still wiping away tears, a man with a sign asked us for money for food.  We acknowledged him but didn’t give him any money.  I got all the way to my car, got in, and wrestled with myself.  I got out of the car and walked back to the theater.  My intent was to ask the man what he wanted to eat, go get it, and bring it back.  When I got back to the theater, he was gone.  I walked up and down the sidewalk a bit looking for him but didn’t see him.  I walked back to the car in the rain.  I wanted to cry. I felt like a fraud.  Loving your neighbor is all well and good when you’re in a movie theater—but what do you do when your neighbor is standing in front of you asking for help?  I felt like I had failed Mr. Rogers, and the man in need, and God, and myself.  Because I am, ultimately, a drama queen at heart, my internal monologue went something like this:  “Mr. Rogers would be so disappointed in you.  Did you learn nothing from that movie, or from him?  When are you going to really live out your beliefs?  What kind of Christian are you, anyway?”  As I drove away, I saw a man a couple of blocks away that I thought might be the same man but I wasn’t sure, because in my embarrassment at not helping him, I hadn’t really looked at him closely (and there’s a deeper lesson in that, too).  I thought about parking and running after him, but didn’t know how to explain myself if it turned out to not be the same man after all.  Then I felt guilty all over again for not stopping a second time.  I wish I could tell you that I stopped then and there and went after him, found out his name, took him out for dinner, and made a difference in the world!  But I didn’t.

I’m going to keep my eyes out for him, though, and for others like him.  I’m going to get restaurant gift cards and carry them with me.  I’m going to try to be kinder to everyone (not just to the people who look and think and talk like me), to help look for solutions to the myriad of problems that plague our country, to love my students—ALL of my students—more and to show it, to make my relationship with them my number one teaching priority; in short, I vow to try harder to be the person that Fred Rogers always told me that I could be.  I’m glad he isn’t here to see what we’ve become—how anguished he would be by the children separated from their parents at the border--but I also wish his wise and gentle voice was here to help guide us through this mess.  God bless you, Mr. Rogers.  Your voice still speaks to us—I hope we listen.