Loose Leaf Notes

– Crying During Acupuncture is a poem I wrote in December and posted here. It was published in February with the below back story at Poets United, an online community site for poets who blog. The poem is included in my book, Packing a Suitcase for the Afterlife, published by Finishing Line Press. 

I lost two brothers a month apart in 2001. It was a complicated grief that wrenched my heart and changed my life in a way I didn’t know was possible. I inhabited my grief fully and wrote a book about it, called The Jim and Dan Stories.

In 2016, I lost my sister and my mother nine months apart. The grief was once again complicated, but so different. It was slower to penetrate, as if it had to go through scar tissue to be fully felt. I’ve been processing the losses incrementally through dreams and poetry. Every nerve I’ve been able hit and every emotion deepened has felt like a gift that I’ve chosen to welcome.

The poems I wrote following my sister’s and my mother’s death fit well as part of a collection I had been working on, Packing a Suitcase for the Afterlife. The collection is a distillation of my life, a tracking of the inner and outer journeys of growing up, aging, care-giving and weighing life’s inevitable losses.

The poem “Crying During Acupuncture” was a turning point. About 6 months ago, some of the cartilage in my knee wore out, causing me to limp with pain. I used the experience to tap into my survivor’s guilt, as well as some delayed empathy for the pain my mother and sister, who both had bad knees, endured.

My knee has greatly improved, mostly through a series of acupuncture treatments. During a recent intense session, I noticed that my acupuncturist had inserted a lot more needles than usual and that the connections and sensations were strong. I asked him if all the needles were for my knee and he answered that he was also responding to and treating other imbalances he found by carefully taking my pulses.

It’s not the first time that I’ve experienced an emotional release during acupuncture. Some of the points when stimulated do result in an opening of the heart and a release of grief. I don’t cry easily (as my sister could) but I cry easier than my mother, a stoic hard worker of German descent.

So the tears came. The first single tear that rolled down my cheek was the one I focused on. It was completely unexpected and spontaneous, and was more beautifully bittersweet than sad. There was a window in my view, and I watched the tall wheat colored grasses bend in the wind as meditative music played in the background. It was timeless, and as if childhood disappointments and the tensions that had collected in the last years before their deaths (related to my mother’s decline and her care) dissolved.

After the session, when I got home, I grabbed my copy of Hans Christian Anderson’s fairytales and re-read the Snow Queen. It was a formative story that my father, who died in 2005, read to me when I was a child – the only story I remember that was read to me. So much of it was over my head then, but I never forgot the part about the love between a little girl and boy who played together.

The boy got a piece of mirror made by demons in his eye, and it distorted the way he viewed the world. He was eventually kidnapped by the Snow Queen and lived in her cold world until the girl traveled the world and found him. When she did, the boy was so happy to see her that he cried, and his tears washed out the mirror speck. I let my own tears purify and save me, the way he was saved at the end of the story.

The pearl necklace in the poem is also a reference to a formative life experience. When I was in second grade, my mother clasped a string of her pearls around my neck for school picture day. It was a gesture that stood out, and I remember feeling beautiful and seen as special by my mother. With her death, it feels like our circle of family, worn from previous losses, has given way, as if the precious parts that once existed tightly together now exist more loosely on their own.

Crying During Acupuncture

Pricked at birth
The sting still hurts

Now my stiffened knee
is loosening

Now one tear falls
for two losses

A mirror speck
that holds the past

The tear my mother
couldn’t shed

The one my sister
couldn’t hold back

It swelled then slipped
like a clean drop of rain

Like a gem of truth
snapped from a necklace

Down my cheek
in un-distorted release

A precious pearl
hard earned

-Colleen Redman / Poets United

Note – You can pre-order Packing a Suitcase for the Afterlife HERE.