. . . Your soul comes out of hiding.
I understand
that you are blessing me.. . .

I find myself — still — groping in wonder. What a coincidence this was. About a week ago my friend Mike emailed me, telling me he and his wife had been going through boxes and drawers and files in their house, and one of the items they came upon was an old poem I had written — twenty-plus years ago, while I was still grieving my wife Barbara’s death.

I had reclaimed poetry at that point in my life because, as I put it at the time, the narrative of my life had been shattered. I was a writer and I needed to write. I needed to put my feelings into words in order to keep on with my life — and poetry allowed me to do so: to reach deeply into the unknown that is grief, to connect with the unknown without “understanding” it.

Mike wrote in his email: “. . . Shelley pulled out a beautiful long poem that you had written about Barbara. Wow, what a force she was and still is. It brought back so many memories. . . . I found myself thinking about the special service you held in Rogers Park for Barbara, and lots and lots of friends and folks who attended. And of course there was the dancing at the end. What a special person she was.”

Needless to say, this was powerful and deeply moving. The poem they had come upon was called “Shanti,” a poem I hadn’t thought about in a long time. This is how it begins:

I approach as a pilgrim
my own memory
of the hour you died,
when the pain furrows loosened
on your face
and you were released,
breath by breath,
to the eternal mystery.
This is as close as I can get,
here, this clean page,
filling slowly with words.
I take up my bedside watch.
The moment’s simplicity
dazzles me.
Your hand is in mine again,
your chest rises, falls,
and slowly rises.
Your soul comes out of hiding.
I understand
that you are blessing me. . . .

I was moved by Mike’s email and revisited the poem, which I hadn’t read or thought about in many years. Life goes on, but sometimes it comes back. What happened next was that my daughter, Alison, came to town. A few days after her arrival, we went to a heart-wrenching event at a nearby cemetery: the installation of the gravestone for Alison’s grandmother, Pearl, who died last summer at the age of 105.

Alison deeply loved her grandma and spoke at the ceremony. She had recently been going through bags of Pearl’s possessions that had been bequeathed to her. In one of the bags she found a poem. Yes, that one: “Shanti.” It was about not simply my wife and Alison’s mom but Pearl’s younger daughter. She died of cancer in 1998.

As I stood there with the others at the gravesite, Alison read the poem. I had no idea she was going to do so, or even that she had come across it. This all came as a total surprise to me as I stood with Pearl’s loved ones and listened. It was almost too much. I could hardly believe it.

This is how the poem ends:
I thank you
for including me in your death
and I see how
you corrected the ancients,
who supplied the dead
with trinkets, artifacts, even food
for their journey …
as though the living know
what the dead require.
You reversed the process
And gave me the gift
(it’s so like you
to do that).
You gave me your ultimate trust,
slipping off as I held you.
My heart is full, and again
I take my first step.

And again I take my first step. And again. And again. All I can say is that life — being — is more than what we think it is, endlessly beginning anew . . . endlessly surprising, endlessly full of both loss and love.

Love never dies. Sometimes it hides, but it always comes out of hiding.