My third Pushcart nomination! And then

Walter watches the ducks

Walter and Betty collaborate

Walter in winter

Thank you thank you to Dale Wisely, F. John Sharp, Annie Stenzel, Bill McCloud, Steve Klepetar, Ina Roy-Faderman, and F. J. Bergmann for nominating my poem "And then" for the 2023 Pushcart awards. Right Hand Pointing is champion of the small but mighty and I am always honored to appear there. But this is much more. My other two Pushcart nominations I could rationalize away:  it was a new journal; I had done the editor a kindness, blah blah. This one has no such handle. And, really, this is a double endorsement: the same group nominated the poem also for Best of the Net.

And we are on the verge of the five-year anniversary of his death. I am on the verge of the five-year anniversary of his death. I will never be done grieving, just as I will never be done loving him, but I am moving through grief, and continuing to live.

 

Everything new is old again

 

We're getting into the time of year when my dear husband, Walter Maya, declined and died. This photo speaks for itself, including the little flourish of flowers apparently growing out of Walter's head:  his playfulness, his imagination, his ability to take what was in front of him and make something good out of it.

And this pertains to writing how? I am in the thick of making a collection of poems about him, mostly directly, and incidentally about mortality and decline. There's a lot of that going around. My memories and preoccupations have always been influenced by the time of year. I wonder if it is the slant of the light and the length of days, but who knows--not me. Anyhow, I am writing new poems about him and adding them to the older poems. I've always written about death and decline, even mortifyingly early on. In the years since his diagnosis with cancer, I wrote very few poems that were not about loss and change, his changes, losing him.

 As a psychologist, I performed neuropsychological evaluations. Which is to say that I used my experience and the available tools to answer questions about changes and difficulties in other people. You might say that I was peculiarly trained, suited even, to notice his changes, his losses, and therefore my losses too.

So, since the last time I posted in this blog, I've been steeped in thoughts and feelings about who Walter was and about the hole his death has left in my life. I do believe I'm making progress in this project, this book-to-be. I don't know if the smaller or larger worlds care about such a thing, but it's what I need to be doing.

I love you, goodbye, I love you

My beloved husband of 35 years, Walter Maya, died on December 16 of lung cancer. He died at home on hospice, free of needles or tubes or any of the futile torments to keep him 'alive' without the capacity to live. His death leaves a vast emptiness in my life, the more so as I had spent most of the last three years taking him to medical appointments, helping him manage activities that he had previously performed independently, taking over all the running of the household and of our lives, and generally loving and reassuring him that I did not love him less as I cared for him more. He was--he was flat-out wonderful, a man of integrity, passion, and wit, with a sly sense of the ridiculous and a love of beauty that extended far beyond his field, organic chemistry. He was my soulmate and companion and dearest friend. (Not incidentally, he was also gorgeous!) I never met anyone else like him, and I doubt I will again. Goodbye, dear love. Goodbye.

The thing is, during his last four months, I essentially stopped writing. I couldn't encompass processing what I was living into poetry. Revision seemed trivial, submitting poems even more so.  I don't yet have time--not really--not with a memorial service and the godforsaken holidays and the notifications and all. Yet somehow, some energy has been freed up. I don't have poems yet, but I do have writing:  fragments, ideas, metaphors. I haven't worked on any of it yet, but I'm making notes. We'll see what comes.

Meredith Burton Mitchell, 1927-2017

My dear friend, my former analyst and supervisor, my mentor and quasi-father, Meredith Burton Mitchell, died today, two months short of his ninetieth birthday. He had suffered increasingly poor health over the last several years. His first heart attack came 35 years ago, late for the men in his family, most of whom died before they were 50. He labored mightily to support his health, his heart, despite several other miserable conditions. His big conceptual contribution to Jungian psychology was to recognize that the opposite of the hero is the victim, and he was determined not to be a victim. Here he is at the left, rejoicing at my wedding, where he was one of the chuppah bearers. The chuppah is the traditional canopy under which the bridal pair stands, and Meredith joyfully helped consecrate my union with my husband.

 Here are Meredith and my husband talking about life--children, retirement, deep and playful thoughts--in Meredith's airy home. I was so happy that they got along so well together.

Roberta, Meredith's wife/widow, and Meredith. They found each other after much travail, and were such a loving couple.

I've been grieving him all day today, and probably will be grieving for some time yet. I met him when I was 17, and he saw me into adulthood and launched me into psychology. What strength, what empathy, what all he overcame himself. Very much a human being, but so aware of the power of the transference and of his responsibility to hold that projection until the patient is ready to re-integrate its power. Thank you. Thank you. We love you. Good-bye.

Distressing accident: death of a hawk

 

 

The top photo is the underside of the wing of a hawk that crashed into a window and broke its neck. The lower photo is a close-up of the delicately and fiercely articulated feet. We must not have been home, because its impact would have made a noise like a car crash--and it was, essentially, a high-speed collision. We had noticed a new hawk in the tree in our front yard the day before. This is, I think, a sharp-shinned hawk; they have a sneaky habit of zooming through our backyard and trying to pick off smaller birds from the bird feeder, which is why we moved the feeder into the patio a few years ago. This one probably mistook a plastic barrier for a clear pathway. The plastic is rather dirty and streaked with cobwebs (not proud of this) so the hawk should have been able to tell that it was not an open passageway. We try to keep the bird feeder from becoming a hawk-feeder, but I'd rather have the live hawk. Hawks maun live, after all.

Not a good time, folks

I know I haven't posted anything new for a while. I haven't been writing, or noticing, much of anything. Our beloved cat Betty, lower pic, died last month of kidney failure. She was 17. She died in my arms, and I cried and cried. A month later, we acquired Freddie, first pic, an adorable 11-month-old tom, playful, affectionate, and smart. He is the only cat I've ever had who found his own toys, such as a shoelace and one of the smaller plush toys we keep for our grandson. We took him to the veterinarian today and learned that he has a horrible immune disorder, and that he will not be with us for very long. I can't do anything for him, and it is breaking my heart. Two cats gone in two months.

Thanatos, du Donnerwort

 

Boots on the ground carrying machine guns, at the Musee d'Orsay in Paris, France, during an exhibition of Manet's work.

Recently my husband and I rented Amour, a beautiful and pitiless movie about being trapped by love when one person in a marriage develops Alzheimer’s. If you have not yet seen this film, I will say only that no one walks out, yet someone is abandoned. I don’t think I am giving anything away when I mention that, finally, the intact spouse suffocates his wife with a pillow. Very difficult to watch; I think I forgot to blink. It got me thinking about other pillow suffocations that have been presented to me, for instance, in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. More recently, though, on The Blacklist, the urbane and infinitely calculating character played by James Spader suffocates the heroine’s father with, yes, a pillow. Then, tears in his eyes, he kisses the dead man on his forehead. The suffocated person is always a patient, has always asked to be killed if they arrive at that miserable level, is always embraced by their merciful murderer. There is, however, something about seeing it on television—network television!—that stops me in my tracks. We are willing to show all kinds of death on television, gory and traceless, kind and vicious, needful and gratuitous; now that anything and everything can be recorded, these scenes are available to children. However, the notion of there being some dignity or necessity in two people having sex, that these might not be wearing any clothes, that it means something powerful to them emotionally—that is considered something that children should not see. Doesn’t have to be explicit, or pornographic. (We have the Internet for that.) Just saying that there are many more incidents of adults being murderous and of it being deemed necessary than of any dignity or rightness attaching to adults being sexual. Yet again, Freud was right: Death wins out over Love.

Quote of the week: Mourning the mourning dove

"Naked as a dead leaf,
scrap of bird with a bone-needle beak"