The Last Word On Nothing

For as long as I’ve known her, my best friend has written a poem each day and then sent it out into the world. For more than a dozen years, she wrote a daily poem. On the day her teenage son ended his life, she stopped. 

I’d grown accustomed to opening Rosemerry’s poems in my inbox each morning, but after Finn died, I found lines from the poems that she was no longer writing everywhere.

There was a poem in the tiny wooden box that was delivered to her door on a day I was visiting, and in the tears we shed failing to understand how a boy who was more than six-feet tall and always in motion could possibly fit inside such a tiny vessel.

There’s a line of poetry somewhere in the Legos scattered across the back of my car after they spilled out of the box of Finn’s belongings I dropped off at the animal shelter thrift shop. I find another stanza in that split-second decision I make when the stranger who’s helping me sees the strewn pieces and jokes about the messiness of kids, and I just nod and smile, rather than burden her with the truth of how those toys ended up in my car or saddle myself with the task of shouldering her sympathies.

I know there’s a poem in our trip to the grocery store, when an object as ordinary as a carton of orange juice becomes a tunnel into grief. Another afternoon, I detect lines of poetry in the story Rosemerry tells me about digging up the potatoes in her the garden without her son, and I’m verklempt when they surface in the first poem she writes, seven weeks after his death.  

Rosemerry is back to writing daily poems, yet I still find unwritten ones scattered around. I notice one this evening, in the shooting star that lights up the sky at the exact moment I look up. Rosemerry calls Finn a comet, but in that moment I know that he’s really a meteor who flashed brighter and brighter as he fell to Earth.

And as I watch the meteor fade into dark, I understand that poetry is the only vessel that can contain grief.

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Image by Ollie Taylor