6/18/2018 Caring Bridge

But I don't want to!

Journal entry by Joanne Negstad — Jun 18, 2018

1. In Blackwater Woods
   by Mary Oliver

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold itagainst your bones knowing

your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

   My friend Paul, fowarded this poem to me.  Mary Oliver writes "you must be able  to do three things"  the third of which is "to let it go."  That's what I don't want to do, no, I do not want to let her go even as I know she's gone.  There is that within me that says "how can she be gone forever?"   There are times when life seems almost normal and then the reality of absence crashes in again.  Being seperated for awhile?  OK, but forever?

Blessings,

al