Taking Cuttings
I cannot acknowledge what happened.
I tend to the plant you gave me -
a mother Asparagaceae, you said,
as though the measure of my missed
attentiveness to her health is a case
of absolute life or death,
as if the nurture of each of her
delicate cuttings into a fresh plant
is the difference between making
it through another day;
each one the gift of a new breath,
as I move her to the windowsill
to face the direction that the sun
will come up from,
to warm her leaves
when it shines again.
In pots of moonlit water
her slight green offspring
tilt encouragingly, ever climbing
in silent chorus toward the light:
“keep taking root,
keep up the good fight.
Her sun is still shining.”
The cold truth takes cuttings from me,
each one leaves a ragged kiss
-sized empty space of my betrayal -
my vacant seat in the church corner:
always the bridesmaid,
never the mourner.
©️Anna Murzyn | 13 Jan 2025
Dedication
This piece is dedicated to Victoria Thomas-Clarke – my darling sister, advisor, advocate, friend, cousin, confidante, partner in crime, travel companion, mum-in-arms..
A beautiful young wife and mother who lost a battle with cancer last Autumn but whom I cannot yet speak of in the past tense. I just can’t seem to get my head to that point, it simply doesn’t make sense.
Perhaps because I did not see her for the last year and, shamefully, was so buried in the difficulties of my own life that I wasn’t even in touch with her for the last six months of hers. I thought she was in remission. I found out she wasn’t on Facebook.
Nobody should have to be bereaved by Facebook. But I deserved it for my absence. I couldn’t cope with anything else in addition to my son’s life-threatening problems and the loss of his father. I was at capacity and had gone to ground.
So I cannot speak of, or even think of my Vic in the past sense or tense. I am clinging to what I have of her and celebrating her life and her nearness, because I am not ready to adjust to anything else. The capacity for that too, is evading me.
Her nearness in the scents of food from her recipes (she was a generous host and wonderful cook), in caring for her plants, readying to plant seeds from her garden, reading her books, playing her music, watching her favourite movies, wearing clothes and perfume she gave me — I have wrapped myself in her presence to give my heart and mind time to slowly shift to the new state of being.
Some people are luminaries in a strange, quirky and indefinable way. They live luminous lives that bring sparks and light into the lives of everyone around them. She was one of these.
Others are more closely connected to and more viscerally present in the world we live in, both past and to come, and it is for this reason that I think it is ok to consider these people as not gone in any metaphysical sense.
They have neither gone back nor forwards, but are merely inhabiting other experiences of being that we do not yet have the capacity to comprehend, but with which they already had some prior connection.
Even to write that sounds more than intangible – it sounds like wishy-washy nonsense that you tell yourself to self-soothe in times of emotional exhaustion, shock and bewilderment.
But I think that’s just fine. Because grief is exactly that.
There’s no right way to get through it, except to go through it.
And in the absence of evidence of where our loved ones, or their souls, if indeed they have them, go to, anything that feels right to those closest left behind is probably ok too.
Honey Bee by author, late summer 2024
