Family Life

for Liza All of us, every single one of us will be an orphan. We will remember our parents, recall the spring morning our father showed us the yellow beginning of each blade of grass, just where it arises out of dark ground into the light. We bent closer to see that sunsplash of yellow, hardly believing a field of green could harbor such a secret. That is a happy memory, I smile when I recall it. Don't you too smile? And then there was the Saturday I helped my Mom bake two loaves of thick white bread. I don't remember what I did, probably just chattered about childish things as she labored in the kitchen. Still my smiling presence made her happy, and that night at supper she told Dad, "Your son helped me make our daily bread." Our family life begins at that moment when mother'scries are surpassed as the new life suddenly slips into the world and her pain becomes rejoicing. This is not the last time pain and joy will overlap. Such is our human fate: we live within opposites, and choose the sweeter of the two. Father looks on in pride, and mother laughs as their new-born cries his need for their love. So begins the cycle of life in love, parents and children sharing the most basic family bonds of growth and education, of happy appointments over time and, yes, disappointments, too. Time will rush us through our mortality so much faster than we desire. Still in our hearts' depth we will say, "My father filled my mind with purpose, my mother listened to me in a room free of worry." But a poet I love and trust has already written, "There was never a parent kept alive by a child's love." How will I, no, how will WE cope with this blunt truth? Do we make ourselves as hard as fate, or do we surrender to the sorrow of loss? Oh, we must be choose the sweeter choice: our parents rejoiced in an abundance of love when we were born; let us rejoice in an abundance of grief when they die. The circle closes and ascends to some higher space of being. (The poet is Louise Gluck, the poem is "Adult Grief" in her early collection, THE TRIUMPH OF ACHILLES. I have followed her throughout her career, for the past five decades. Her poems are luminous, whether they deal with the dark fate or the light fate of being human. She has written the necessary poems for my life to be complete.)