Loose Leaf Notes

The kleenex box got passed around the classroom a few times at the Radford University Death and Bereavement class where Katherine Chantal and I were recently guests, sharing our Grief and Relief, Soulful Aging Poetry to counseling students.

Professor Alan Forrest was our host, and it wasn’t the first time I had been a featured guest in the class. After the 2001 deaths of two of my brothers that played out like a Hollywood script, I wrote about their deaths, growing up in the South Shore of Boston in a family of nine-siblings, and the first six months of intense grief in a book called The Jim and Dan Stories. Alan, who my husband studied under and who he currently co-teaches mindfulness classes with, used the book as part of the class curriculum for five years or so, until it went out of print.

Alan introduced us to the class and then we gave some more background and insight into our interest into depth psychology and why we write poetry on loss, grief and death before beginning our call-and-response readings to the class of 26 or so. Every death is a big bang / that blows up our pretense / splits us like atoms in two… I looked students in the eyes as I read, and they looked back.

Katherine and I both read poems about losing family members, brothers, a sister, a husband, a parent, a great niece. Katherine, a ceremonialist who facilitates life passages including death memorials, spoke of sitting with a friend before she passed and I shared being with my brother Dan as he took his last breath. I read Jim and Dan: The Second Anniversary of Their Deaths, a best-of poem I’ve been reading for decades that is one of Alan’s favorites. In closing, the breath became a theme…

It was our sixth Soulful Aging reading (with four different variations of poems) So far, we’ve read at The Little River Poetry Festival (2 years in a row), the Jesse Peterman Library, The Soup Shop and the Floyd Yoga Jam.

The last hour of the night was spent with the students reading their heartfelt and poetic statements that came from taking in the readings. There were goosebumps, sighs and knowing nods. It was a meaningful sharing all around.

HERE is a post from 2006 and one from 2007 when I was a guest at this class._________Poets and Storytellers United