An Amateur Mourning Map for Mothers of the Recently Murdered

[barbtries]

written in 2001, after my daughter was killed, i was moved to post it here due to the death of a DUer's nephew. This recently murdered young man died in Iraq; he was 23 years old.


An Amateur Mourning Map for Mothers of the Recently Murdered

The terrain is extensively traveled,
Though to my knowledge never charted.
Trust your reluctance,
Grip the remains of your faith,
Know you have no choice.

Mourning begins at Shock Summit and wends its way
Across Hills of Horror to the door of the mortuary.
There you celebrate and prepare to bury your
Slain child, after which those who sustained you
From the first phone call to the funeral fade,
Even as the flowers are fresh on your baby's grave.

The living return to their lives and you alone
Enter the Desert of Despair at the section where
Only mothers of the murdered gain admittance.
The apparition beside you is either your dead child,
Or a hallucination grown from your desire.

Either way cling to that apparition.
Step in line with the many mothers
Forced on this treacherous trek
Fraught with troughs of tormented thought
Toward all of tomorrow bereft.
Can you trust a moment of post-mortem joy
That visits you in your sleep?
Will you ever want to be awake again?

Admittedly I've not traveled that far.
I have surveyed a span a bleak that
Challenges that dares that forces me though stricken to move
Not a room, not a street
Not a moving crowd of mourners,
But an eternity imposed upon and enclosed
Within a lifetime -
A lifetime left to hold a death within.

My life, that gave life, which was then
Robbed by a person who killed and still lives,
Moves slowly but necessarily
Toward the conveyance of its finest fertility
And fiercest love, to the other side
Weighted, shaded, dressed for a funeral,
Crying, keening, asking why.
Lingering longingly beside a blank infinity
That was supposed to hold her child's life.

[Bunny]

1. That's very haunting.

I'm so sorry for the loss of your daughter. :hug:

[tavalon]

2. Wow

It was hard to breathe through that one. I've never lost a child (nor borne a child, though I tried) but lost my mother when I was eight. I might once have thought that it compared and yet, through this poem I see starkly that it does not. Mine, while painful and borne 35 years ago come June, was nothing compared to this pain.

My loss makes it possible for me to imagine this level of pain perhaps, but probably not. How did you, how do you find the strength to continue to breathe, to go on?

I have recommended this. It needs to be seen by a wider audience.

[enough]

3. Thank you.