Beyond Precious
Oct 20 2010


The first person who ever died
was my grandmother.
We may have been close, once
but I don’t remember much.
Baked goods, mostly.

Back then, children did not attend funerals,
not in our tribe, anyway.
Perhaps, we were being protected from death
in that brief bright world
of the very young,
when everything is as it was
and forever will.

My mother’s father eventually moved in with us
in a basement room
that was always cold.
He smelled old.
His strong hands
looked wasted.
Even a kid could feel the tension
— the sins of the fathers
conveyed down the generations.
So, will I be as distant
as my own parents age?
And when he too eventually succumbed,
the vague sense of endings
became hard-edged fact.
And life, in turn
beyond precious.

Language, and abstract thought
make us human.
The opposable thumb
a social culture, passed on.
But most of all
when we learn we are mortal,
and our beautiful innocence
is irrevocably gone.

Ignorance, though, is never bliss.
And I’m glad I know
we are not for long.



I’m always resisting the urge to write about death. Perhaps it’s that I don’t want to be seen as so morbidly pre-occupied. Or my belief that people don’t want to keep reading about death. Or that it’s just self-indulgent and pretentious: a big subject, where anything you say can appear profound.

But I guess it seemed time, again. And I’m pleased with the way I entered into a poem with such a heavy philosophical message: that is, keeping it small and personal. The message, of course, is that despite our fear and avoidance of death, it really is essential to the full appreciation and enjoyment of life. Everything would change if we lived forever. I suspect we’d lose our drive, our edge; and would spend eternity fighting boredom. And also that what separates us from the other animals is not empathy or culture or the use of tools, but the unavoidable awareness of our own mortality (and language, of course.)

I also like the celebration of that fleeting interval of childhood innocence.

The allusion to inter-generational friction hints at nothing dire or deep. It’s simply a product of a non-demonstrative family, whose interactions are more head than heart. We weren’t the touchy-feely types! Although I guess my mother did have some baggage from the past. (Both brothers, though, are very much touchy-feely with their own families. So perhaps this is the generation that stopped passing it on.)