This column is dedicated to my sister Mary, who always read my Gloucester Daily Times columns. And always, always called the following day with compliments, no matter the quality of the prose. She was a real fan, loyal and positive, completely biased. I loved those calls for their warmth and kindness, one of many bonding rituals we shared over a lifetime. When Mary died July 11, I quickly promised to write my next column in her honor.
Our family continues in shock, deeply saddened. Mary had chronic heart problems for years, but rallied through crisis after crisis. “Chronic” became the important word, the problems kept under control by modern medicine. Her cardiac arrest that Friday came as an awful surprise. Her death still seems impossible.
Condolences help and they are still pouring in. Mary touched and helped hundreds in Gloucester through her work as a career counselor, first at the high school, later from Washington Street, and for years out of the state offices on Jodrey State Fish Pier. She had troops of friends from her decades in the city, first in Magnolia and later Wheeler’s Point. The condolence notes are sentimental or plain, short or long. All have one essential message: I witness your grief. A friend, Gregg Sousa, got it right: “I’ve never been much on, ‘It’ll get better’ … Best I can do is, ‘I get it.’” and that is exactly the correct message; it is the best any of us can do. Everyone is overwhelmed, sooner or later, by a close death, that special grief. We commiserate. We bleed. We get it.
Another friend, Michele Harrison, sent lines of a wonderful Maya Angelou poem, “When Great Trees Fall.” The poem doesn’t deal with immediate grief but later, calmer times, a sort of peace. When our restored senses whisper:
“They existed. They existed.
“We can be. Be and be
Better. For they existed.”
Yes. Be better. In the stricken humility we experience after a death there is a temporary window when we are innocent and teachable, in close contact with our own and the loved one’s better natures.
Mary’s better nature included deep empathy for others, optimism despite anxieties and life’s roller coaster, a continual, unrelenting kindness. Another poet, Georgia’s James Dickey, talked about hope and kindness, our better natures, in “Strength of Fields”:
“Wild hope can always spring
“From tended strength. Everything is in that.
“That and nothing but kindness. More kindness, dear Lord
“Of the renewing green. That is where it all has to start:
“With the simplest things. More kindness will do nothing less
“Than save every sleeping and night-walking one of us.”
Our family is better for my sister’s love and kindness. The world is better. And I am especially grateful for her last kindness, a grief-given glimpse of wisdom.
John J. Ronan is a former poet laureate for the city of Gloucester and host of “The Writer’s Block” at 1623 Studios.