| Thursday, November 1, 2007 5:02PM | | | | a sense of humor helps but poetry.. | Posted By: Dorothy Allison
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The loss of Grace Paley feels like the closing of a century. This one is going to be harder without her—without many of those who have been mainstays for a fully engaged life, those who spoke out and wrote and acted to make a difference in the lives of so many.
Grace Paley’s death followed on the loss of our beloved great aunt, Mary Brown. Our ‘GrandMary’ died of a sudden heart attack last spring and shortly after my partner, Alix Layman lost her father to a reoccurrence of cancer. For months we had to sort out and manage all the mundane details these unexpected losses required. It was hard to grieve while answering the onslaught of mail and messages, to adjust while arranging memorial gatherings and choosing the right urn, to explain to our son what this means—to say that his people are not gone out of his life, just out of this world. Their love for us and their memories remain.
Now I am trading calls and notes with two close friends watching their mother’s in what might be the last season of their lives. Another friend wrote me to say that we're watching our people fade and slip away. But I am still sorting through the boxes of GrandMary’s papers—photos, letters and notes and clippings from thirty years singing light opera with the Lamplighters down in San Francisco. I miss her terribly, but remember how often she told us how happy she was. I find a note in my journal about how frustrating it was to deal with her when she was being her most entitled middle-class self—and another where I made her over into a fictional character just to see if I could sort out how she saw herself and the world. As a character she was impatient and a little indignant, but mostly profoundly amused with me. I think if she could have, she would have put me in a Gilbert & Sullivan chorus.
GrandMary prayed daily, Christian scientist prayers, unspoken but resonant. My Baptist childhood could barely inhabit the same room with her Mary Baker Eddy books and papers. The newsletter still comes to the house. More often than I would have believed, I find myself skimming the thing. Every now and then I imagine GrandMary seeing me do so.
The dead are not dead while they can make us laugh at ourselves.
Still, the best way I can handle all this loss is to go back to my shelves and read again all the old poems and stories.
On the wall above my desk I keep a piece of the poem ‘Then’ by Muriel Rukeyser. It helps.
"When I am dead, even then
I will still love you, I will wait in these poems.
When I am dead, even then
I am still listening to you.
I will still be making poems for you
out of silence;
silence will be falling into that silence
it is building music."
And I remember one of the things that Grace Paley said about her own work - that she wrote for the still small hope of justice. | | |
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1 Comment | Add a Comment |
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| 11-2-07 2:03PM: Anthony Valerio said...
consoling, beautiful, thanks, as all morning been writing about best friend who passed. What you've done is have it come with life from them to us too.
Anthony Valerio
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