Roots and Wings

Foreword

Few things go deeper than relationships with parents, or are more complex. And as children become adults and their parents move inexorably towards decline and death, the complexity only deepens even as a primordial simplicity reemerges. Catching something of both the complexity and the simplicity in mere word-nets feels futile, yet I not only keep trying but feel emboldened to share some of these attempts with others. While these reflections are of course personal, they touch, I trust, on things universal. Many besides me have struggled with ambivalence towards their parents, and all of us, unless the natural order is reversed, have to live through the fiery crucible of our parents’ dying.

The poems relating to my father—mostly written in 1988, between the discovery of his cancer in January and his death in September—are an attempt to “come to grips” with an imminent radical loss. Perhaps they can speak to others who have passed through the same crucible, or shudder to feel it coming.

While some of the poems about my mother similarly touch on her grappling with Night coming, many others address some of the intricacies of her and my relationship—at once wonderfully close and painfully distant, and not surprisingly at times contentious.

When worldviews at stark variance coexist within a family, they can’t help but surface whenever matters of substance come up, which of course is often. The world always has a way of intruding. As often as Mom and I agreed to avoid talking religion or politics, to stick instead to safe subjects like flowers, sports, poetry and Scrabble, we kept getting sucked back in. Our repeated failures to get the other to “see the light” invariably would lead to frustration if not anger, both of which concealed sadness at such a gulf separating. Were these just matters of reason, we might have been able to have dispassionate discussions, but throw in mother-son, decades-long dynamics plus topics that don’t lend themselves to dispassion, and it’s clear that sustained detachment didn’t have a chance.

Dad felt much as did Mom on matters religious and political but was better at dropping controversial subjects, or never bringing them up. This strategy kept us from “getting into it,” but it also kept us non-communicative on important things. I grieved this distance between us long before he got cancer.

All of this may be hard to fathom for those who have never parted from their parents’ basic beliefs, or for those who, while differing greatly on issues, have been able to achieve a “live and let live” respectful tolerance allowing for honest exchanges that aren’t taken personal. These poems speak, instead, to the painful reality of being closely bound to those who, in essential ways, inhabit what feels sometimes like a different universe and who see such difference as cause for reproach and lament.

But these decidedly are not poems of reproach and lament. They are rather poems of tribute and love—not the Hall Mark variety glossing over conflict but love poems nonetheless. Despite all the dynamics and differences, we shared a treasure world of memories and milestones and, most important, through it all we stayed connected, our bedrock family attachment deepening to the end.

Come learn of the man from whom I learned stability, integrity, roots; come learn of the woman who opened me to beauty, empathy, wings. Ponder in the process whence might have come your own grounding and soaring.