Slowing Unto Stopping

[I've been stuck with writer's block for the better part of the last month, trying to piece together something on the occasion of my grandma's death.  It's not that there's been a shortage of things to say, rather that the experience has significance beyond losing a loved one.  Figuring out which aspect of that experience represents the greater forest of trees seems like a undertaking that will write itself when the time is right.  Of all the things wrapped into the dying and death of my grandma, the smaller realities --the idea of entropy, the grace of slowing unto stopping --is something that is immediately accessible.  I'm no Yeats in my ability to talk with any deeper eloquence about entropy and I definitely can't come close to Eliot's masterpiece on aging, but her passing has left me with a few certainties that I feel like I can discuss.  The photographs --images of the Slaby farmstead, the drive back to my father's childhood home on the rural Kansas-Nebraska border, my grandmother's burial, cleaning the house following the funeral --is, for me, a record of what it means to get older, to relinquish things that are gone, and to see my family's history in the context of my own, separate life. It is, in a sense, what Adrienne Rich describes as "diving into the wreck."]

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When I'm old I'll walk like this:

feet crooked like fork tines

pegging the wood floor.

click

.

.

.

click

.

.

.

click.

Stepping and then stopping

                         to breathe.

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