Anniversary
Added 2023-10-12 09:59:29 +0000 UTCA poem I wrote about my mum, here with us as kids. It’s the anniversary of her death today and I’m thinking about my friend Cal who died yesterday and the things they had in common, and the shapes they left in the world.
I feel like when someone we love dies, our job is to carry forward as much as we can, the good ways they were.
To pass forward the way my mum would look at you with her full attention and *care* so much, even when she was suffering. To see my colleagues do well and celebrate them, the way Cal did. To see the best in people and make them want to be more *that*, for your joy and their warmth.
To love your friends and family fiercely and deliberately, not taking time for granted. To see reality clearly for all the horrors that it holds, all the chasms and sucking holes, and choose to bring yourself to the room even so, smiling and caring.
I don’t believe in life post-death
or even in
a moment that stays on beyond
itself; no inference, it’s just the sum
of things we do, things left undone.
No self but in continuum.
What I do believe in is momentum - that
one thought leads to another; that
people leave shapes in other people; that
those people, shaped, move on. This
is a small belief.
one
thing leading to another, too
small perhaps to constitute more
an observation, except only for
the sense that this is all that’s left of us,
when every sense declares us gone:
The shadows that we made in time
for other things to grow in.
- Alice Fraser
