There were times Ruma felt closer to her mother in death than she had in life, an intimacy born simply of thinking of her so often, of missing her.
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Unaccustomed Earth

Dear Mom,

Today, I’m sitting in your chair with your cat on my lap. Your absence is a palpable presence as we sit here in the home whose every wall and corner is filled with you. We think of you so often that our thoughts sit companionably beside us and open their arms in love. There is an intimacy born simply of thinking of you so often that your voice rings through our days, assuring us that we are not alone.

Still, like many who have lost their mothers, I’d trade this intimacy for the real thing. That is, I’d trade the intimacy born of simply thinking about and missing you for an afternoon with the real you. Particularly on this Mother’s Day when there are so many things I’d like to tell you.

I’d like to tell you–again–that I want to be like you when I grow up. Oh, I know that by all accounts, a 67-year-old woman should be grown up, but I like to think that I’m not done growing, that I still have time to become more like the woman you were. Each year, I would write this in your Mother’s Day card, this wish to grow into the grace and wisdom that are attributes of the quintessential mother. And each year as I wrote this, I meant it perhaps more sincerely than I’ve meant anything. I want to be the mother and woman who is sorely missed because she was an unfailing champion for those who needed a safe place to land, an advocate for those who believed they had no voice, and a lens through which others could see themselves as you did: loved and seen. You were all that–and so much more.

I’d like to tell you that your phone calls were lifelines. Through my own years of mothering and teaching, thirty minutes on the phone with you gave me the courage and conviction to face a new day, to meet it with your words in my ear, to suck the marrow from it with gratitude and joy. Four hundred miles away, I leaned into those conversations with hope. Now, I often find myself picking up the phone in expectation. And then I remember that you aren’t there to pick up your cordless phone with a familiar, “Hi, Shan.”

I’d like to tell you that I remember everything. That I remember too much. That, some days, the memories are too heavy to bear, while other days, they buoy my spirit as I sail into my day. I remember the power of your make-do-ness to transform a barely middle class life into a wonderland. I thought the lavender floor-length dress you made me for my junior prom was a confection in dotted swiss. I marveled at how you could stretch a dollar and a pound of hamburger. And when I said I wanted a blue birthday party during my kindergarten year, you broke out the bottle of food coloring and used it liberally, turning the cake, ice cream, and Kool-aid royal blue. (No one escaped without blue lips and finger tips!)

In his book, For One More Day, Mitch Albom writes:

But there’s a story behind everything. How a picture got on a wall. How a scar got on your face. Sometimes the stories are simple, and sometimes they are hard and heartbreaking. But behind all your stories is always your mother’s story, because hers is where yours begin.

Like Albom claims, behind all my stories are your stories. Recently after my granddaughter’s track meet, I was telling her the story of the district meet my junior year in high school. As I recounted the wind and sleet, the cold that cut through our cotton sweat suits and numbed our legs, I remembered that behind this story was another more remarkable story. This was the story of a mother who sat in the stands (one of a handful of spectators braving the weather), huddled under a Hefty garbage bag and sporting a plastic visor to keep the sleet from her eyes. This was your story, Mom. As I’ve told it over the years, people invariably chuckle at the image of a mom wrapped in plastic. But I want them to see what I see: a mother who showed up, again and again. Standing alone at the start of the 200 yard dash, I had only to look into the stands to see you smiling and waving and to know that–win or lose–you’d drive me home.

In her best-selling novel The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt describes the grief of a son whose mother is killed in a terrorist attack:

I missed her so much I wanted to die: a hard, physical longing, like a craving for air underwater. Lying awake, I tried to recall all my best memories of her—to freeze her in my mind so I wouldn’t forget her—but instead of birthdays and happy times I kept remembering things like how a few days before she was killed she’d stopped me halfway out the door to pick a thread off my school jacket. For some reason, it was one of the clearest memories I had of her: her knitted eyebrows, the precise gesture of her reaching out to me, everything. Several times too—drifting uneasily between dreaming and sleep—I sat up suddenly in bed at the sound of her voice speaking clearly in my head, remarks she might conceivably have made at some point but that I didn’t actually remember, things like Throw me an apple, would you? and I wonder if this buttons up the front or the back? and This sofa is in a terrible state of disreputableness.

I want to tell you that I understand this grief and how waves of ordinary things keep washing upon the shore of my consciousness. Small things that would never be scrapbooked or photographed come in with the tide of a moment. In the months before you died, I keep remembering how when I hugged you, you were a bird with hollow bones. I felt as though if I didn’t ground you in my arms, you’d simply float away. Years after my father’s death, I remember all the times you told me that you’d been talking to him, your hard, physical longing laden with sorrow and with beauty. And I remember once when I was frantic with worry about something (I’ve forgotten what), you assured me that everything would be o.k. and offered me this: Just don’t get your blood in a bubble. And I thought, who says this? You did. And now I do, too.

Most of all, I’d like to tell you that when I close my eyes today, I can see you and Dad driving into the countryside where the wild honeysuckle is in bloom, and the sky hangs clear and cornflower blue above you. I can see the road open before you, and redwing blackbirds strung brightly along utility lines that stretch into the distance. And you are young and in love. The glorious May afternoon pours in through your open windows, and you can think of nowhere else you’d rather be.

Today, I can think of nowhere else I’d rather be but in the home you made for all of us. So, I’ll sit here with the cat on my lap, and the silence generous enough for my sorrow and my joy. I can think of nowhere else I’d rather be but in this place where I learned what it means to love and be loved.

Happy Mother’s Day, Mom.

With all my love,

Shan

A poet must never make a statement simply because it sounds poetically exciting; he must also believe it to be true. –W. H. Auden

“You really know how to end a poem.” After reading each new poem I sent her, my mother’s words were a constant and hopeful refrain. Months after her death, these are words to write by, and more importantly, to live by. For if ending a poem in truth is essential, so, too, is ending a life.

Sonneteers know the power and value of a good ending. Line by line, they drill down into a final couplet which delivers so much more than a poetically exciting rhyme. In these final two lines, sonneteers give us the wisdom that distinguishes the endings of the best poems. A poem should begin in delight, claims poet Robert Frost, and end in wisdom. Consider the final couplet in Sonnet 18, one of Shakespeare’s most famous sonnets:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:
   So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
   So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Now this is a great ending! Here, a lover proclaims that his words will forever testify to his beloved’s beauty and worth. Neither death nor time will diminish her, so long as his words live. Oh, to be immortalized by a great sonneteer who understands just how to make a final, grand statement!

In my more cynical moments, I begin to wonder if a true statement is a dying thing, an anachronism that lives solely in our memories. In the past few years, I’ve heard more people my age speak fondly of news anchors like Walter Chronkite who wrote:

As an anchorman for the CBS Evening News, I signed off my nightly broadcasts with a simple statement: “And that’s the way it is.” To me, that encapsulates the newsman’s highest ideal: to report the facts as he sees them, without regard to the consequences or controversy that may ensue.

I can’t help but envy the certainty of Cronkite’s parting words: And that’s the way it is. To leave your viewers with the truth, to live up to your highest ideal as a news anchor, that must be wonderful. When I consider what passes as news today, I salivate at the prospect of a newsperson whose integrity is forged and defined by such truthful statements.

American painter Jackson Pollock knows the value of making a statement. He writes:

It doesn’t make much difference in how the paint is put on as long as something has been said. Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement.

Cynically, I also wonder if we’ve come to value technique more than truth, style more than statement. Today, our leaders and celebrities toss out lovely words which essentially say nothing. We’re offered pieces of art and photography which may be technically good but often fail to move us. They simply don’t arrive at a statement. They say nothing. I recall an assignment for one of my graduate courses in poetry writing. We were asked to find an example of a good poem, one that exemplified the traits we’d been studying throughout the term. During the next class, one of my classmates volunteered to read the poem he’d brought. I’m paraphrasing, but it went something like this: Outside my window, a sparrow chirps. Silence filled the room as he let these words sink in. Nervously, he finally broke the silence by saying, “I mean, there’s not much here. But that’s the point, isn’t it? It seems like there’s not much here, so there must be something. Right?” If this poem were intended to be an example of postmodernist technique, it left my classmates and I scratching our heads. Did this poem actually say anything?

Our postmodern age tends to thumb its nose at anything that smacks of being sentimental or absolute. It’s simply not cool to show that you care–in art or in life. Sadly, what this often means is that we don’t make statements for fear of being called sentimental or judgmental. Actor Jon Voight countered this prevailing philosphy in this statement:

“Climb Every Mountain” is a beautiful statement of philosophy. Critics may think “The Sound of Music” is saccharine, but I think it’s profound. The message, that we can’t accomodate evil, is just as important today.

Voight challenges us to consider that The Sound of Music is more than a saccharine, feel-good film. It goes without saying that the music is wonderful and the cinematography spectacular. The film’s statement about refusing to accomodate evil, however, is even more profound. Aesthetically beautiful, The Sound of Music also has something to say.

In art and in life, we may be tempted by the styles and techniques of the times, spending our time and money on appearance, on what culturally passes as “good.” But if these things become our statements–that is, if style and technique trump wisdom and truth–this should give us pause. If our legacies are built upon things which essentially mean little (or nothing), this, too, should give us pause.

I learned everything I know about how to end a poem and a life from my father, an unfailing champion for the heroic voice in an age of indifference. In advocating for the power and usefulness of such a voice, he wrote:

Which started me thinking again about poetry, especially its usefulness. If writers write long enough, they write for their lives. If they persist in wanting the right words in the best places, they begin to sense a floor beneath their work, something more than stylish or momentarily pleasurable. In short, something solider. These are the writer’s underwritings. Every long-term poet, even one who deflects a knowledge of it, takes a discernible stand, and his underwritings, whether he knows them or admits them, become as crucial to his life as to his art.

With each poem I write, I sincerely hope that I take a discernible stand, that I give my readers something more than stylish or momentarily pleasurable, that I write for my life. And I sincerely hope that my underwritings, my statements of wisdom and truth, become as crucial to my life as they are to my art. I hope that I answer my father’s call to action: In a dumbed-down age, why shouldn’t poetry speak up? Although it may feel increasingly risky to speak up, one can seek sanctuary in statement.