Forgotten by most of society, Maryam Henderson experienced two devastating events that ultimately changed her course: a 25-year prison sentence and the death of her son, Augustine.
Maryam was serving her sentence at St. Gabriel’s Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women when she received the news that her oldest son had died in a motorcycle accident. There were no social or mental support systems available for Maryam. In addition to the absence of professional assistance, she could not even take refuge in the support of her prison community. A gesture as simple as a hug from another inmate could result in a minimum 90-day stay in solitary confinement, known as “The Hole.”
Recently, there has been mounting attention surrounding policies and practices for incarcerated women – and for good reason. According to the US Department of Justice, since 1980 there has been a 716 percent increase in female incarceration. In Louisiana, black women are incarcerated four times more than white women. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, more than half of America’s prison population has a child under 18. The racial inequities surrounding child loss are staggering. Black Americans are two and a half times more likely to lose a child by age 20 and three times more likely by the time they reach 50-70 years of age.
“I am continuing to live with it: the death of my son and re-entry into society,” Maryam shares. Knowing firsthand the unequal support former female inmates receive, Maryam has channeled her energy and love into supporting formerly incarcerated women through her upstart venture SisterHearts Boutique & Thrift Store. “SisterHearts” is an affectionate term identifying women formerly incarcerated, those still in prison, and others who have supported Maryam since her release.
SisterHearts Boutique &Thrift Store is no small affair. The 15,000 square-foot facility is located in St. Bernard Parish, one of the areas hardest hit by Hurricane Katrina and an integral part of the community. Beyond offering goods ranging from common household items to clothes to furniture, SisterHearts focuses on “decarceration” training by creating a safe space for transition back into society. “Decarceration” focuses on rebuilding identity and empowerment by reversing negative behaviors.
She also has made transitional housing a focus of her efforts. Maryam knows from her experience in the criminal justice system that inmates are required to provide a residential address as a condition for release. For a variety of reasons, many women lose their homes while serving their sentences. To address this challenge, Maryam offers a free six-bed facility for those women who have no home to return to or a safe place to stay upon reentering society.
While she clearly focuses on serving formerly incarcerated women, Maryam also works with former male inmates, who support the store. Michael Coleman has been with SisterHearts since the beginning and has developed customer service, merchandise repair, and management skills.
While Maryam provides practical and emotional support for those much of society has forgotten, she faces common struggles as a small business owner and bereaved parent. “I live with Augustine’s absence daily. Just like a mother’s love, this pain can never be erased. I honor his memory by loving others and working hard every day to strengthen my heart.”
Kevin, a fierce protector of his nine siblings and Nancy and Ray’s son.
A Bereaved Mother’s Day
Dr. Mom, otherwise known as Nancy, is an unflappable mother of ten and leads her large family with grace, instilling a deep love for life in all her children. As a psychotherapist who specializes in addiction and trauma, she has a soft spot for people and falls in love easily, especially with children. Kevin was no different.
Kevin and Nancy.
Kevin joined the twelve-member brood at the age of fourteen. “We got a call from a foster care agency saying he had nowhere to spend Christmas, asking if we could we take him for a couple of weeks,” says Nancy. “So, we did. And we fell in love with him.”
While it took some time to bond, Kevin soon curled comfortably into his new life, even joking that the family must have lost him at birth, and it simply took 14 years for them to find him. “He was able to overcome the experiences of his past and learn to love and trust. It was a beautiful thing to witness,” she says.
By 16, he would bristle whenever he was asked if Nancy was his “real” mom. He told her, “I decided that ‘real’ means you Raise me, you Enjoy my company, you Answer all my tough questions and you Love me — that’s REAL.”
He became a fierce protector of his nine siblings as well as an overall optimist and frequent smiler.
Kevin was the kind of young man who brought his mother flowers for no particular reason. And from the time that he began his first job as a teenager, he would request every Sunday off because “that’s our Family Day day.” With a large family, celebrations are frequent, and four years ago, the day before Mother’s Day, was no different.
The family was celebrating Ricky’s 11th birthday, Kevin’s younger brother, with several friends when 25-year-old Kevin headed to work. Just as they lit the candles on Ricky’s cake, officers arrived with the news that literally knocked Nancy off her feet. Kevin had taken a shortcut to work, jamming to music with earbuds while walking along a Vermont railroad track. He was killed instantaneously by a train.
The Mother’s Day card he had purchased lay on his bed, unsigned.
Anniversaries
The weeks leading up to the fourth anniversary of Kevin’s death have been particularly difficult. “For some reason, the three-year anniversary was easier for me than this one, and there is no rhyme or reason for it… I’ve come to accept that I can’t predict the best or worst days,” Nancy said.
She always prepares for Mother’s Day, birthdays, and anniversaries. She and her husband, Ray, Kevin’s stepfather, take the day off work. “But there are some days I can’t prepare for,” Nancy confides. “There is no explanation as to why certain days just take your breath away and knock your feet out from under you.”
Nancy takes a lesson from another tragic loss in her life. Just before Nancy’s 10th birthday, her older foster sister, Elaine, was murdered. Pictures of Elaine around the house just disappeared.
“We never talked about her — she was completely gone. My parents said they were advised not to take us to the grave or talk about her,” Nancy said. “That was a big mistake. It made it very hard to cope with the grief. My husband and I have made a conscious effort to go the other way — Kevin is not a forbidden topic.”
Nancy talks about Kevin in a vibrant, vivid way and encourages the rest of her children to do the same. He loved to sing constantly, “but was awful,” laughs Nancy, noting that he often put his family in stitches with his off-key stylings. He had a big sense of humor, a habit of blurting out movie spoilers, and disturbingly stinky feet. He had a strong Christian faith and regularly assisted with the sound equipment at church.
Making memories
Each of her children chose a support buddy to be with them through the wakes and funeral. “I think that was the therapist in me,” says Nancy. Friends and family members were tasked with keeping a special eye on the children, whether they needed a drink of water or a person to lean on. “It helped us to know that just for a little while, we could just focus on Kevin and our own grief,” says Nancy.
At Kevin’s wake, Nancy and Ray invited people to sculpt their memories of Kevin out of clay and make two copies — one to stay with Kevin in his coffin, the other to keep. Memorabilia included shakes with straws and two impressions of the sheriff’s badge demonstrating who Kevin was and all the people he touched.
Balls of blue yarn, Kevin’s favorite color, were situated throughout his packed service. Attendees tossed the yarn creating such a giant web that firefighters teased it might be a fire code violation. But it “showed how Kevin connected us all in his short life. We put a piece of blue string in each program as a reminder that Kevin built connections between people and that lives on.”
Struggling to parent surviving siblings
The hardest period Nancy remembers was a few weeks after Kevin died. “The sympathy cards stop coming and people aren’t bringing meals anymore,” she said. “You’re expected to function, and you don’t even know how.”
Nancy couldn’t even go to the grocery store — “people would come over and say, ‘are you okay?’ And you’re thinking, ‘just let me grocery shop, I’m barely hanging on.’ I started grocery shopping several towns away for a while not to have people approach me.”
She also began to feel fear for her other children, that was sometimes overwhelming.
“For a while, I was so scared that they would die that I set up a system with them,” Nancy said. “We picked out the panic face emoji. If I sent it out to them it just meant ‘I need to know you’re alive’ and they would send back kisses and hugs.”
Nancy and Kiki talk about Kevin and railroad safety.
The profound loss challenged her beliefs as a parent. Her catchphrase for all of her children had long been, “I gave you life to live!” She had encouraged them to move fully into their lives and travel. Kevin had done mission work in Mexico. “After Kevin died, I just felt like I changed my mind — I gave you life to be in a bubble, to stay safe and protected from everything. But they would bring my words back against me… It’s hard. What if living life means you’re taking risks that mean you could die?”
Finding purpose
Nancy had gone back to get her Master’s Degree in Psychotherapy and finished her program just weeks before Kevin died. Around that time, she began to feel uncertain that she should go on and pursue her Ph.D.
“It was one of those times when the roles reversed. All of a sudden, Kevin was lecturing me, “Mom, it’s been your lifelong dream to get your doctorate. ‘Don’t give up, don’t stop.’ And he ended that speech with, ‘Besides, I’ve been waiting to call you Dr. Mom.'”
She postponed her Ph.D. program for nine months but realized how heartbroken Kevin would be if she didn’t finish. “So, I started it — and I have felt him with me all along the way,” Nancy said.
While rearranging her bedroom to create a space to study for her spring exams, Nancy found the last birthday card Kevin gave to her. “When I opened it, it said, ‘I can’t wait to call you Dr. Mom.’ It was strange to find that right as I started the exams.” Nancy has stayed open to, and taken comfort in, any sign that connects her to Kevin.
“I’m a logical, scientific person, but I need those signs,” she says. “Sometimes I wonder if it’s just our intense need to feel him with us that makes us read more into something than is really there. If this is the case, I don’t want to know because I choose to keep feeling those connections with him.”
Then her exams fell on the anniversary of his death. At first, it was really painful, but then I realized it was kind of his way of saying, ‘I’m there, I’m with you.’ When I do finish (in 2020), I’m going to change my license plate to Dr. Mom.”
Blessings of love and a life to live
The day after Kevin died, Nancy’s best friend called and told her to look outside. There was a double rainbow. “I like to believe it was Kevin’s Mother’s Day gift to me.” The first time Nancy shared her sister’s murder publicly was in 2012, then “on the way home, a double rainbow appeared,” she says. “Kevin and I talked about that as Aunt Elaine sending her blessing of love.”
As Nancy’s two youngest children, Kiki and Ricky, headed out to do mission work with homeless individuals in Boston, she said “part of me is like, ‘don’t go out on the streets of Boston — that’s dangerous!’ And another part of me feels like ‘live every day fully because you don’t know how many you might have.’ This is the biggest balancing act.”
For now, however, Dr. Mom will continue to look for double rainbows and tell her children ‘I gave you life to live.’
Across America, powerful imagery and musical cadence ring out in coffee shops and onto the page during National Poetry Month. Launched by the Academy of American Poets in April 1996, the month-long recognition celebrates the poets’ integral role in our culture and society. We are reminded that poetry matters.
Evermore’s very own Jena Kirkpatrick (editor of this newsletter!) has been a poet for over three decades, and when her son, Ellis, died, she was gifted What Have You Lost?, an anthology of more than a hundred poems selected by acclaimed poet Naomi Shihab Nye. Nye called on poets to help answer this question, and for Kirkpatrick, these collected works helped her cope with her pain.
So, to honor our losses and the great poets who help us find words to describe the indescribable, Kirkpatrick spoke with some of the nation’s most distinguished poets — Naomi Shihab Nye, Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, Beth Wood, Brady Peterson, Regie Gibson, and Nathan Brown to share their thoughts on grief, how it affects their writing, and how poetry can help grieving and bereaved people.
Each of these poets, acclaimed in their own right, generously shared their personal insights following their own losses, their poetry, and the navigation of delicately placed words we choose to honor our beloved.
Naomi Shihab Nyedescribes herself as a “wandering poet.” She has spent more than 40 years traveling the country and the world to lead writing workshops and inspire students of all ages. Born to a Palestinian father and an American mother, she grew up in St. Louis, Jerusalem, and San Antonio. Her awards and honors are numerous — among them are the Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets, four Pushcart Prizes, the Robert Creeley Prize, and “The Betty Prize” from Poets House. In 2019-2020 she was the editor of the New York Times Magazine poems. She was named the 2019-2021 Young People’s Poet Laureate by the Poetry Foundation and, in 2020, awarded theIvan Sandrof Award for Lifetime Achievement by the National Book Critics Circle. Nye is a Professor of Creative Writing – Poetry at Texas State University. Nye is the author of dozens of poetry books that can be found here.
Regie Gibson is a literary performer, songwriter, author, workshop facilitator, and educator. Regie and his work appears in the New Line Cinema film love jones, based largely on events in his life. He is a former National Poetry Slam Individual Champion, and was selected as one of Chicago Tribune’s Artist of the Year for Excellence for his poetry. He has co-judged the Chicago Sun-Times Poetry Competition, has been regularly featured on NPR and has appeared on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam. He is the author of Storms Beneath the Skin.
Rosemerry lives with her husband and daughter in Placerville, Colorado, on the banks of the wild and undammed San Miguel River. Devoted to helping others explore their creative potential, Rosemerry is the co-host of Emerging Form, a podcast on the creative process. She also directed the Telluride Writers Guild for ten years. She has 12 collections of poetry, and her work has appeared in O Magazine, A Prairie Home Companion, PBS NewsHour, American Life in Poetry, on fences, in back alleys, on Carnegie Hall Stage, and on hundreds of river rocks she leaves around town. Beneath All Appearances is a new, collective work of collages and poems by bereaved mothers Rashani Réa, Damascena Tanis, and Trommer; it has been called “a pole star for those who grieve.” This month, Samara Press will release her next collection, All the Honey. She’s won the Fischer Prize, Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge (thrice), the Dwell Press Solstice Prize, the Writer’s Studio Literary Contest (twice), and The Blackberry Peach Prize.
Brady Peterson lives near Belton, Texas, where he worked building houses for much of the past thirty years or teaching rhetoric and literature at a local university. He once worked a forklift in a lumber yard in east Austin, tried to teach eighth graders the importance of using language, worked briefly as a technical writer, and helped raise five daughters. He has run one marathon, fought in one karate tournament, climbed one mountain, failed to make the UT baseball team as a walk-on, and took tango lessons with his wife. He is the author of Dust, Between Stations, From an Upstairs Window, García Lorca is Somewhere in Produceand At the Edge of Town.
Beth Wood is a modern-day troubadour, poet, and believer in the power of word and song. Beth has been writing, performing, and creating for twenty-five years. In addition to releasing fifteen albums, Beth has released three books of poetry, Kazoo Symphonies, Ladder to the Light (2019 finalist for the Oregon Book Award Stafford/Hall award for poetry and 2019 Winner of the Oregon Book Award Readers’ Choice Award) and Believe the Bird (Winner of the San Francisco Book Festival Poetry Award). She has been recognized by the prestigious Kerrville New Folk Award, The Sisters Folk Festival Dave Carter Memorial Songwriting Award, the Billboard World Song Contest, The Oregon Book Awards, and many more. Beth lives in Sisters, Oregon, with her rescue dog Hannah and is continuously writing and rewriting her artist’s manifesto.
Nathan Brown is an author, songwriter, and award-winning poet living in Wimberley, Texas. He holds a Ph.D. in English and Journalism from the University of Oklahoma, where he’s taught for over 20 years. He served as Poet Laureate for the State of Oklahoma in 2013/14 and now travels full-time performing readings, concerts, workshops and speaking on creativity, poetry, and songwriting. Nathan has published over 20 books. Most recent are his new collection of poems, In the Days of Our Seclusion, the first in a series, now known as the Pandemic Poems Project, that deals with the year of the pandemic, and a new travel memoir Just Another Honeymoon in France: A Vagabond at Large. Karma Crisis: New and Selected Poems, was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and the Oklahoma Book Award. His earlier book, Two Tables Over, won the 2009 Oklahoma Book Award. Brown’s poem “Nevertheless, It Moves” comes from his book To Sing Hallucinated: First Thoughts on Last Words.
We are joined together by so many things in grief. Maybe there’s a luminous cord connecting us through sleepless hours and hardest times. The poet Jack Ridl told me years ago, after my father died, “Grief is an ambush. When you’re least expecting it, it rises up again…”
Poetry is a close focus on something cared about. Whether you are writing or reading a poem, the poem (if you like and relate to it) brings you into an intimate space of details and affections – linkages and leaps. It’s a point of gravity again, stirring the heart.
Loss can feel numbing – a blur of overwhelm and sorrow, profound regret and insatiable yearnings. After our son died suddenly, I found myself wishing I could just turn my mind OFF. I felt an entire loss of meaning and gravity. I couldn’t write anything but tiny thank you notes for food and flowers for more than two months.
A child is the central engine of a parent’s heart. No matter what age they are, or what the circumstances, the child is the connecting thread to time – past and hoped-for future and always, always, present. What are they doing right now? How are they? Where are they? After his death, I missed the easiness of days, every random memory, and all our humor. All the plans. Everything reminded me of him. When scraps of humor started kicking back in again, it was like an old rusty propeller trying to spin.
Reading poetry gave my mind something to settle down inside, in even the worst times – a place to land. I had read Edward Hirsch’s profoundly moving Gabriel years before and went back to it. I read the astonishing Elegy by Mary Jo Bang, which won the National Book Critic’s Circle Award.
I was not terribly attracted to grief and healing books. They have good intentions, but. People will keep writing you, “There are no words” – but there ARE words. There have to be words! We live by words! No, no words will ever fully encompass how sad we are. But there are still words.
When finally, I felt able to write again in the third month, once again the tiniest things seemed most fortifying. This has always been my watchword in writing – stay tiny. No big ideas, only tiny ones please. Attempting to iron a stack of rumpled clothes and tablecloths one day, I heard the hissing of the steam iron and remembered he had once told me it was his favorite sound of childhood. So, the first little poem I wrote was called “Hiss.” It comforted me even to say the smallest thing in honor of him. One poem led to more. I also allowed some emails to provoke poems – here is one of those. I’m sending you some love out there.
About Naomi Shihab Nye
Naomi Shihab Nyedescribes herself as a “wandering poet.” She has spent more than 40 years traveling the country and the world to lead writing workshops and inspire students of all ages. Born to a Palestinian father and an American mother, she grew up in St. Louis, Jerusalem, and San Antonio. Her awards and honors are numerous — among them are the Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets, four Pushcart Prizes, the Robert Creeley Prize, and “The Betty Prize” from Poets House. In 2019-2020 she was the editor of the New York Times Magazine poems. She was named the 2019-2021 Young People’s Poet Laureate by the Poetry Foundation and, in 2020, awarded theIvan Sandrof Award for Lifetime Achievement by the National Book Critics Circle. Nye is a Professor of Creative Writing – Poetry at Texas State University. Nye is the author of dozens of poetry books that can be found here.
Before my son Finn died, I already had a daily writing practice in place. The day he died was the first night I hadn’t written a poem in over thirteen years. And then I didn’t write at all for the first seven weeks after his death. I suppose on the surface then it would look as if it shut the writing down, but in fact, I believe that this break opened me up. I wanted to be (really more like had to be) open to the pure experience of the wide spectrum of feelings I was having—such devastation, so much love. I found myself meeting life in a porous way—a way beyond understanding or framing. I remember feeling as if my daily writing practice had prepared me to stay curious and attentive during that time, and I needed to simply feel. And then, when the day came when it rose up in me to write again, I remember being so grateful to be able to explore all the nuances of grief through language. Over a year later, I find that writing helps honor all the shades of loss—sorrow, gratefulness, horror, hope, suffering, connection, love, pain, communion. Writing helps me feel more connected to my son through memory, and it helps me explore this new ethereal relationship with him. For the first many months of writing, I could only write about loss (and the love that saturates it)—all writing was through this lens. It almost felt like a betrayal at first to write about anything else. Now I am more at home with the paradox of being full of great grief and great gratitude at the same time—and the poems certainly reflect that. That was the long answer. The short answer: I feel as if meeting Finn’s death has made me a more compassionate, spacious human, and I imagine this comes through in the writing.
There have been several poems that saved me during this time, most importantly this partial poem from Gregory Orr: “Not to make loss beautiful, but to make loss the place where beauty starts. Where the heart understands for the first time the nature of its journey.” The moment I read these lines, I felt so known, so companioned, so guided, so seen, so met. I knew that someone else truly understood what I was going through. This is, of course, one of the great gifts of poetry—it is a language of connection. But it is also, I believe, a language of paradox, mystery, a willingness to engage with uncertainty, to “live into the questions,” as Rainer Maria Rilke said. And that is what meeting the death of a beloved has asked me to do again and again. Poetry doesn’t solve or fix anything, but it does offer open arms to cradle us as we grieve.
About Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Rosemerry lives with her husband and daughter in Placerville, Colorado, on the banks of the wild and undammed San Miguel River. Devoted to helping others explore their creative potential, Rosemerry is the co-host of Emerging Form, a podcast on the creative process. She also directed the Telluride Writers Guild for ten years. She has 12 collections of poetry, and her work has appeared in O Magazine, A Prairie Home Companion, PBS NewsHour, American Life in Poetry, on fences, in back alleys, on Carnegie Hall Stage, and on hundreds of river rocks she leaves around town. Beneath All Appearancesis a new, collective work of collages and poems by bereaved mothers Rashani Réa, Damascena Tanis, and Trommer; it has been called “a pole star for those who grieve.” This month, Samara Press will release her next collection, All the Honey. She’s won the Fischer Prize, Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge (thrice), the Dwell Press Solstice Prize, the Writer’s Studio Literary Contest (twice), and The Blackberry Peach Prize.
Losing anyone in your life affects EVERYTHING in your life.
Your perspectives shift. You question your own mortality.
Losing someone close to you makes you feel like a raw nerve in a world of razor-wire. Everything hurts.
Losing my dad just before becoming a father, seemed extra-ordinarily cruel and ironic. But, contemplating that cruel irony eventually led me through the “Why me” of it— to the “Why NOT you” of it! This marked the beginning of a more philosophical, questioning tone in much of my writing; which was previously marked more by highly critical and declarative rhetoric.
As a result of the transformation that profound loss engendered in me, I came to see that the most effective poems are those which help us more profoundly contemplate our place in the world and what we make of it. How we might become better-acting agents in whatever time we have available which, no matter how long that is—loss shows us is not enough?
This poem, by Andalusian poet Adi Al-Riga, speaks so viscerally of grieving. Speaks to how the small and mundane can trigger our grieving— and how that grieving can awaken in us something difficult to name. Poetry helps us name it. Helps us give it language—to call it something. Poetry helps us get a fix on it, shape it— and, perhaps, dialog with it. I am reminded of Billie Holiday— a woman with a voice born of such grief, singing “Good Morning Heartache.” At the end of the song, she asks Heartache to sit down. In this, as in Adi Al-Riga’s poem, I find a solace and a strength in that embracing of vulnerability.
This, to me, is another way in which poetry helps.
Also, poetry asks us to sit and feel, in a world that tells us to flee and forget!
Poetry asks us to slow down and reflect, when modernity demands we speed up and never look back at the emotional road-kill we might have become. It allows us to concentrate on our shared humanity at a time in which we are enjoined to externalize and socially aggress against one another. It demands we wrestle through the complexity of emotional paradox when so much tells us the world is a black-and-white bumper sticker.
Poetry, to me, respects our complete humanity when so much of the public discourse seeks to reduce us to tools of service. It doesn’t treat us as mere means to an end— but may help us determine what we want OUR end to MEAN.
Poetry lets us know that, not only are we not alone in our grief, but we are understood and respected for it! I mean, unless we are sociopathic, if we live long enough and love fully enough, grief is inevitable. So, even though every day we arise with tears, poetry can lead us to both our passion and our compassion— it can help us better decide how to walk through this world as both a metaphor of, and a monument to, the best of what those who have left… have left us.
About Regie Gibson
Regie Gibson is a literary performer, songwriter, author, workshop facilitator, and educator. Regie and his work appears in the New Line Cinema film love jones, based largely on events in his life. He is a former National Poetry Slam Individual Champion, and was selected as one of Chicago Tribune’s Artist of the Year for Excellence for his poetry. He has co-judged the Chicago Sun-Times Poetry Competition, has been regularly featured on NPR and has appeared on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam. He is the author of Storms Beneath the Skin.
Forgotten by most of society, Maryam Henderson experienced two devastating events that ultimately changed her course: a 25-year prison sentence and the death of her son, Augustine.
Nancy takes a lesson from another tragic loss in her life. Just before Nancy’s 10th birthday, her older foster sister, Elaine, was murdered. Pictures of Elaine around the house just disappeared.