A commemorative bench for my parents on the Constitution Trail, Normal, Illinois

As readers of this blog will know, until his paralysis in 2007, my father loved cycling, and the creation of the Constitution Trail in Bloomington-Normal was a great event for him. He cycled on it regularly and indeed, talkative man that he was, he also made friends there. After his death in 2009, I talked with my mother about arranging for a commemorative bench on the trail, an idea that really pleased her. When she died in 2011, I wanted to include her, too, somehow. The bench is located in Fairview Park. (If you click on the photo, it should enlarge.)

I look forward to visiting the bench when I'm next in town, probably early September.

i.m. Bernadine Marie Meeker Etter, 30 July 1945-29 July 2011

My nephew, Brandon Etter, and my mother in July 2001

Mothering Sunday (UK)

Christmas 2010. Experience and Innocence. My mother, above, had lost her husband in March 2009 and was persisting sadly and hopefully. My niece Sara, below, is now ten and as easy and happy as she was then. 

In England, it's Mothering Sunday, reduced to 23 hours by the time change. I'm a little grateful for the shortening. I'm reckoning what I'd trade to have my mother back again for an hour, a week, a month, a year. Make me an offer....   
 

Waking

I've had a winter of illness after illness, leading to a gap of months between composing poems. It feels strange when that happens, but I'm not one to worry I'm going to stop writing. I've been writing poems for over thirty years, and they always come back to me.

I'm not sure illness is the only reason for the pause, though. I've spent the better part of the last year revising my manuscript Imagined Sons through the exchange of the final manuscript and various proofs with my editor at Seren. Given the content of the work, I find each read through emotionally exhausting and wrenching. And for the last couple years, whenever I have the impulse to write poetry, I almost always write about my parents. 

In my father's case my family won a wrongful death settlement for his paralysis and pain the last two years of his life. I still feel so much anger, pain and regret almost five years on. 

My mother died most unexpectedly two years later. One week she was ill with what appeared to be a stomach virus; the next week, going in for a colonoscopy, she was dead. She was my closest friend, and every day I still feel her loss--the world seems far less generous, far less kind without her. 

So I think I may try to get away from what comes naturally to me to write and pursue one of the projects that's been welling at the back of mind, such as the erasure of Esther Summerson's chapters in Dickens's Bleak House or to address in poetry the plan to relay the Bath Abbey floor with all its memorials. I'm sure, as always, updates will follow.

i.m. Bernadine Marie Meeker Etter, 30 July 1945-29 July 2011

my mother with her grandson Brandon Etter and granddaughter Sara Cummings

You are daily, horribly missed.

i.m. Bernadine Etter, 30 July 1945-29 July 2011

My niece Ella and my mother Bernie, April 2010

Every day since your death I carry the large hollowness around with me and suspect the best part of my life is over. You were Home, and now I linger, adrift, violently uprooted. 

Sunflowers is out!

Sylph Editions' Nobile Folio of Peter Coker's painting, "Sunflowers," is out, with my series of prose poems, "Meditations." The series intermingles responses to Coker's painting with thoughts on my late mother and flowers; the piece as a whole is dedicated to her memory. You can learn more about the folio on Sylph Editions' website here.

Six months gone

Click to see this picture enlarged and the wonderful expressions on their faces better.

My niece Ella White (formerly Katelyn Etter) with my mother, Bernie.

The shirt's she wearing is one of the ones I kept.

He had no idea what he looked like to others. He wasn't sure what he looked like to himself. He looked like what his mother saw when she looked at him. But his mother had passed on. This raised a question for advanced students. What was left of him for others to see?

Don DeLillo, Point Omega

Good-bye, Annus Horribilis

The year began well: in February I brought out my second book of poems, Divining for Starters, and in April I moved in with my boyfriend, while continuing to write and teach (two of my greatest pleasures). But on 29 July my mother, my dearest friend, died too soon, most suddenly and unexpectedly, and August became the worst month of my life, full of family slights and betrayals alongside sorting through my parents' belongings and finances and suffering an incredible grief. In the last month I've started to feel a little better, feel myself inside a slightly lesser mourning, but it's hard to imagine what would make the next year worthwhile. I plan to read and write more, to try to write better, to continue reviewing and publishing, but I'm not excited by these prospects the way I used to be. I am waiting to be excited, I think. I am hoping and watching. And remembering my parents in their stunning absence.

O Christmas Tree

Tonight, decorating my boyfriend's shiny fake brown tree, strung with bunny lights, I broke for a moment. (Is that oxymoronic--can one really break for just a moment; is it then not a real break?) I was hanging ornaments, and for many years I bought matching ornaments for my mother and I, to create a mirroring between home and away. I couldn't remember the origins of some, while others' purchases I recalled vividly, as with those from the Mikasa outlet in Irvine; the strangeness of buying crystal snowflakes in a desert.

In my ten years in England, I think I've seen candy canes just once, and so finding them today amid online grocery shopping startled and delighted me. On Christmas Day candy canes would appear on the tree, as though left by Santa; there were several late nights I put those candy canes up for the sake of my younger sisters and later my nieces and nephews. Now I'm eager to repeat the same, as I cling to that sharply severed thread to the past.

Often in my thoughts are my parents' histories, which they referred to in asides and the odd anecdote over the years. Both were only children. After my father died, my mother intended to write down what she knew of her family's history, once she retired; she died days before the first retirement check arrived. I scramble at what I remember, knowing how much information my parents held dear that died with them. There is so much information, and still so much lost.

From here I see a rare photograph of my father smiling after his paralysis. He's got a Christmas present in his lap. One brother in law, two nephews, and my mother are scattered and intent on their own purposes in the background, and for once Dad looks at ease in the ill-fitted wheelchair. I had a tremendously nourishing family life, I knew and appreciated the fact, and oh, life seems so meager without it.

Four Months

I'm still waiting for you to come back. Almost every day I think of calling to talk, to put this horrible nonsense behind us and tell you all about the new cats, the teaching, poetry and ask after your cats, your teaching, what you're reading. Before I pick up the phone, though, I admit, rationally, you're gone, and then the ache, the deep-chest ache, and the longing to return to the moment of denial, the moment you were almost still here.

Three months gone

Living in a world where you are not is unbearable.

Two months gone

This is the last picture I took of her, sitting at the other end of the couch from me. Without thousands more words, I can't describe the extent of my loss.

Cooking for One

Since I arrived at the family home on the first of August, I have spent hours each day going through my parents' papers, and it's excruciating to see this stuff of lives knowing the lives it accompanied are gone. I've read truly countless bills and financial statements, but I've also come across love letters, a draft notice, an impressive collection of 60s Democrat memorabilia, old photos of people I don't recognize, loose bits and bobs, and the letters I sent my parents over the years, especially in the days before email.

One of my sisters told me there was more cat food in the trunk of my mother's car, and within this hour I encountered another motley array, recent purchases including some books, catnip, Christmas paper plates and wrapping paper, cat food and a box of instant amaretto cappuccino sachets. I expect the latter was for me and my expected visit later this month, as she knew I loved amaretto and had bought me Amaretto di Saronno as a Christmas present on at least one occasion, and on several visits home I'd bought the makings for amaretto sours and made them for my parents and I.

More sad were some of the books. There were a couple novels, apparently picked up secondhand, as well as a few nonfiction titles: the first I saw were Cooking for One and Facing Loneliness. My mother has struggled on her own since my father died in March 2009, and these titles, and, found a few minutes later, Healing Grief, struck me hard with the pain of her sorrow. I dearly wish I could have done more to mitigate it.

Screams for my mother

Written on the flight from London to Chicago

NO NO NO NO NO NO NO

COME BACK COME BACK COME BACK COME BACK

IT WAS A COLONOSCOPY--WHAT DO YOU MEAN SHE CODED AT THE BEGINNING OF THE PROCEDURE?

WHO WERE THE TWO DOCTORS WHO TURNED HER AWAY, SAYING IT WAS STOMACH FLU? GIVE ME THEIR NAMES

NO YOU CAN'T YOU CAN'T LEAVE ME HERE ALL ALONE

WE WERE SUPPOSED TO HAVE ANOTHER VISIT WE WERE SUPPOSED TO HAVE THREE WEEKS TOGETHER

YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO LIVE FOREVER

Henry Etter and Bernadine Meeker, 1965

The year before they married

My mother's obituary

appears in today's Pantagraph.

20 Things My Mother Loved (or Liked)

1. John Denver, the person and the music. All of it. She saw him in concert and met him several times.

2. Maeve Binchy novels. The Irish settings help (she was half-Irish and grew up largely with her Irish grandparents).

3. Melon, all kinds

4. Cats. The house on Arlington Drive, where she lived the last 37 years of her life, always had cats, and for a while, a dog named Buffy.

5. Panera Cafe in Bloomington.

6. Shakespeare. When my visits coincided with the Illinois Shakespeare Festival, we'd attend one or two plays together.

7. Playing silly computer games, like Chuzzle

8. TV medical dramas: St. Elsewhere, ER, Grey's Anatomy....

9. Pizza with lots of vegetables, especially green pepper and black olives

10. Daisies

11. Cooking. Specialties included lasagna, beef stroganoff, and ham and bean soup.

12. Fish. She loved to eat all kinds of fish, every which way. I can remember dinners with her where she had catfish, tilapia, orange roughy, and salmon (not all at once!).

13. Sales. Garage sales.

14. The color blue

15. Her dark burgundy sofa with the recliners on either end

16. Strawberry daiquiris (not that she had them often)

17. Autumn foliage

18. Old James Bond movies

19. Getting her hair cut

20. Constant Comment tea

Requiescat in Pace Bernadine Marie Meeker Etter, 30 July 1945-29 July 2011

You were the best thing that ever happened to me.

On this day 45 years ago,

my parents married and spent the first night of their honeymoon at a motel in Kankakee, Illinois, that burned down years ago.

An anniversary doesn't end just because one spouse is no longer living, just as we still think of a particular day as being a person's birthday long after she's gone. As regular visitors will know, my dad died two years ago, so this anniversary is a solitary one for my mother. I wish I could spend the day with her, reminiscing and hugging and crying when we can't help it.

I've been thinking of their anniversary all week, of the extraordinary marriage they had. It's harder for the fact that Father's Day is tomorrow. Such a weekend.

Let it rain.