Jun 29, 2023 | Advocacy, Community, Family, Grief, Research
By Terri Schexnayder
Five new releases have landed in bookstores and audible programs recently. Each one delivers the topics of grief and loss through unflinching honesty with the author’s personal story—some even include moments of humor. We encourage you to read and share with bereaved family and friends these selected books.
Dina Gachman’s self-help book, So Sorry for Your Loss: How I Learned to Live with Grief and Other Grave Concerns, was released on April 11, 2023. Since losing her mother to cancer in 2018 and her sister to alcoholism less than three years later, the author and journalist has dedicated herself to understanding what it means to grieve, healing after loss, and the ways we stay connected to those we miss. Publisher’s Weekly called Gachman’s book “a poignant, personal exploration of grief.”
Regarding her esteem for Joyal Mulheron and the nonprofit she founded, Evermore, Gachman said, “after going through a traumatic in-home hospice experience with my mom, I was so happy to discover Evermore, and find out that there are people out there trying to reform bereavement care in the U.S. Until I went through it, I had no clue how emotionally, physically, and spiritually depleting and devastating it could be. I was so moved by Joyal’s story, and by the stories of others I spoke to for the book. So many of us out there are suffering through caregiving or the loss of a loved one, with little help, and Evermore’s mission is one I fully embrace. We need more help and more understanding around death, grief, and loss at home, at work, and as a society.”
In an excerpt from Gachman’s chapter about hospice, the reader learns more about Joyal Mulheron’s own struggles with the system after the loss of her infant daughter Eleanora:
Bereavement care in America is broken, if it even exists, says Joyal Mulheron, founder of Evermore, a nonprofit focused on improving the lives of bereaved families through research, policy, and education. … She saw firsthand how “broken” the system was when insurance companies would call her during her daughter’s pediatric in-home hospice and ask how many days or weeks it would be until her daughter passed away. Mulheron said she had twenty-three providers, but she was the one doing the caloric calculations, making sure her daughter was getting enough nutrition to keep her comfortable. … During that time, the company she worked for asked for her resignation, since she was caring for her daughter and could not devote herself to the job as she once had. Now, she is working to change those systems that were so broken for her, and for so many others.
After avoiding her grief from the loss of her father to bone cancer when Laurel Braitman was a child, the New York Times bestselling author eventually faced—and embraced—her pain in her thirties. What Looks Like Bravery: An Epic Journey Through Loss to Love, released by Simon & Schuster on March 14, 2023, is referred to as the “hero’s journey for our times.”
Her literal journey through mountainous regions, encountering life-threatening wildfires, and visiting with others about their grief along the way, Braitman’s powerful memoir “teaches us that hope is a form of courage, one that can work as an all- purpose key to the locked doors of your dreams.”
She shared how she, like so many of the children she met with, felt shame after their loss. “I became a facilitator to help grieving kids who lost siblings or who were ill … What I learned from them was that shame is really just another way to control the uncontrollable.”
Released on April 4, 2023, A Living Remedy: A Memoir by Nicole Chung, a Korean-American writer who was adopted by white parents is personal and addresses an important topic. Chung not only writes about the loss of both her father and mother to illness within the span of a few years but tackles the issues of class and the inequities of medical care in the United States. She witnessed this firsthand, especially when her father was dying, noting his death was “no doubt exacerbated by his lack of health insurance and limited access to care in the small Oregon town” where Chung grew up.
Chung shared an interview with LitHub journalist Hannah Bae. “I felt compelled to write about grief but also this common American experience, where so many people in this country who are not fantastically wealthy end up facing illness or loss without all the resources and support that we need.”
On Grief: Love, Loss, Memory by Jennifer Senior, released on April 4, 2023, is based on an intriguing story around the journal of a young man Bob who died on 9/11 at the World Trade Center. Atlantic writer Senior interviewed Bob’s parents after his death. Years later, she shared with NPR’s Rachel Martin her desire to find the truth behind why the journal ended up with Bob’s fiancé Jen rather than his mother. “[His mother] was so upset and said, ‘How can you give away the last thing our son ever wrote?’ It was – it is a chance to have – to hear his voice one more time, to, in a weird way, be in conversation with him …”
The nagging question for Senior became, why didn’t Jen give the journal back when Bob’s mother asked for it? On Grief answers that and provides a larger conversation about the book’s title.
The Archaeology of Loss: Life, Love and the Art of Dying by Sarah Tarlow, released on April 20, 2023, shares the archaeologist’s shock and grief when faced with the sudden loss of her husband Mark. Called “a fiercely honest and unique memoir,” it reveals how nothing could have prepared Tarlow, after years of studying death in her research, for the loss of someone she loved. About writing her memoir, Tarlow said:
“When you find your husband lying dead, you think you will not forget a single detail of that moment. As an archaeologist, I like to get my facts right … I am excavating my own unreliable memory. I cannot go back and check.”
Resources:
So Sorry for Your Loss: How I Learned to Live with Grief and Other Grave Concerns
What Looks Like Bravery: An Epic Journey Through Loss to Love
A Living Remedy: A Memoir
On Grief: Love, Loss, Memory
The Archaeology of Loss: Life, Love and the Art of Dying
Time: How to Connect with Loved Ones After They Die
The Guardian: The Archaeology of Loss
WNYC Memoir About Avoiding Grief
NPR: Grief Book Has Its Roots in the Long-Lost Diaries of a 9/11 Victim
LitHub Nicole Chung on Writing Through Grief and How to Begin Again
Apr 12, 2023 | Community, Family, Grief
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.
About Naomi Shihab Nye
Naomi Shihab Nye describes 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 the Ivan 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.
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.
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 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.
About Brady Peterson
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 Produce and At the Edge of Town.
About Beth Wood
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.
About Nathan Brown
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.
Apr 12, 2023 | Community, Family, Grief
Dear Friends unknown,
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 Nye describes 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 the Ivan 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.
Resources
Naomi Shihab Nye website
Young People’s Poet Laureate by the Poetry Foundation
Ivan Sandrof Award for Lifetime Achievement by the National Book Critics Circle.
Find Nye’s books in Evermore’s bookshop here
Apr 11, 2023 | Community, Family, Grief
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 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.
Resources:
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer website
Emerging Form, a podcast on the creative process
Beneath All Appearances by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
All the Honey by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer’s photo was taken by Joanie Schwarz
Read other acclaimed poets reflections on grief
Apr 11, 2023 | Community, Family, Grief
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.
Resources:
Regie Gibson website
Storms Beneath the Skin
Read other acclaimed poets reflections on grief
