Rage, Rage Against the Dying of the Light

Posted on January 29, 2025 by dinafried

The day I arrived in New York to help deal with my father’s medical emergency, they were repairing the sewer pipe under my parents’ house.

The onslaught of noise was deafening as workers cut through an entire square of concrete then lowered themselves into the cavernous maze of underground pipes to search for the blockage. It took them two days to find the troubled spot, which had already plagued my parents for a week: no showers, no laundry, minimal dishwashing, and a directive to flush the toilet only when absolutely necessary. And after all that noise and digging, the blockage turned out to be not in the area where they’d dug at all. They found the problem in the sad little brick-enclosed square of dirt my parents call the “front yard”–under a rosebush that had already been reduced to small rootball and a few aspiring fronds.

The next day, when my father was officially referred to hospice and people rained all that “death is a passage” stuff on us, I thought about that sewer pipe–also a passage. And I also thought about the Dylan Thomas villanelle and its repeating haunting lines: Do not go gentle into that good night … Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

It isn’t that I want my father to fight against the reality of his dying. I feel grateful that he is not–and has never been–an angry or vengeful person. Even in his compromised state, while depressed about what is happening, he continues to exude kindness and express love and gratitude to those around him.

But I feel like raging. Not at the inevitability of my father’s death, but at the sadness of seeing him so frail and unable to do things for himself–the “dying” of my image of my 90+ year-old parents as timeless icons of longevity.

And I feel myself raging against the barely flickering “light” of my country. Yet this rage feels like a fruitless kick-the-floor-and-flail-my-arms temper tantrum. Pundits tell us to keep breathing and find joy. The sun is brilliant on the half-inch of freshly fallen snow today. But where is the balance between digging and doing what we can and totally abandoning ship, closing our doors and taking out whatever might constitute our modern-day “opium pipe” to lose ourselves in a stupor of disempowerment and apathy.

I’m forever grateful to Bishop Marianne Edgar Budde, who was able to channel her rage into a calm and quiet plea for mercy, focusing the whole time she spoke, toward whatever light might be left that’s still shining on who we could be–individually and collectively. And I’m wondering if that’s the kind of light that flashes before our eyes as we near the end of our lives in addition to reliving all of our life’s significant moments. I’m wondering what my father, an Emmy Award-winning journalist, is thinking as he sits hooked up to his oxygen machine with the New York Times spread on his lap, trying to stay awake long enough to get through more than a paragraph and make sense of all that’s happening around him.

Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.

While we all have to accept death, as hard as it is, we mustn’t go gentle into this dark time, or accept the numerous attacks on our Constitution as the legitimate prerogative of a new leader. I feel grateful for the many in our community who are joining together and channeling their quiet rage into action. Death may be a lonely endeavor, but raging can be a community enterprise. I’m grateful to the many who are standing up to support immigrants, transgender people, the environment, and the many other important issues that are under attack.

In fact, what keeps me finding joy is knowing I have community–both to support me during this difficult personal time and to work together on keeping the light shining.

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Mattering and the Power of Witnessing

Posted on August 30, 2024 by dinafried

Writing is easy, you sit at the typewriter, open a vein and bleed.

Paul_012, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

My aim in writing has always been to get to a deeper, grittier place, beyond the personal into some universal but often unspoken experience. Yet, getting to the central core of rawness isn’t easy. I can’t begin to count how many times I’ve looked at an unfinished poem or piece of fiction and said to myself, “Push!” a process that feels as difficult as giving birth.

And at least when one gives birth, there’s a baby at the end of the effort. With creatives, the labor continues—the question of what lies behind the next edge continuing to linger as we try to reach deeper layers of mattering.

It’s important to realize that despite these efforts, sometimes our creative expression won’t be easily discernible—or even appropriate—for an outside audience. Occasionally I write “private poems” solely for my own cathartic release in lancing some emotional clot.

Yet, having gentle, loving witnesses can enhance and deepen our creative confidence—as long as they stay in the role of witnesses, not judges. When a witness tells me what they liked or noticed, they tap into that shared place I’m reaching for and let me know that my words touched them—and mattered.

If you’ve never shared your art, music, dancing, writing, etc. with other people, or only had bad experiences because the people you shared it with gave you unsolicited and unhelpful criticism, I recommend finding someone who understands the difference between witnessing and judging. (Note: I’m not against and fully aware of the benefits of constructive criticism, but judging is a different process from witnessing, which should be done at a time when the creator is asking for and expecting it.)

There are many community writing and other creative-based class settings that use a witnessing framework. For dancers–or for anyone who simply likes to move–Authentic Movement is built on the model of mover/neutral observer.

If classes don’t appeal, find a friend you trust—perhaps someone who’s also engaged in something creative where you can both share the roles of creator and witness. Remind each other to keep comments to what you liked and/or noticed, and then bask in their affirmation that yes, indeed, you matter.

Moonstruck

Posted on April 18, 2024 by dinafried

Because I’ve been traveling so much and fighting off a benign but annoyingly persistent respiratory illness, I’ve been late to the table writing about the eclipse.

But I was one of many folks who drove several hours to the totality zone for a few minutes of day-time darkness and a gaze at the celestial wonder of the corona, which we shared with strangers in a community park in a small town in northern Vermont. Things seemed pleasantly normal in the hour before the big event. People donned eclipse glasses to sneak views of the disappearing sun, children ran through the grass playing, and adults waited in lines for free pizza cooked in the community stone oven or to silk-screen a t-shirt as an Eclipse Day souvenir. But when totality hit, something shifted in the energy. There was a hush among the crowd, a kind of collective “wow.” My eclipse glasses now dark, I was nervous about viewing the corona with unprotected eyes, but there it was, eerie and other-worldly, the tiny ring of light flaring in asymmetrical bursts before settling to a steady glow like a small spark of hope.

Jongsun Lee, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Then the moon moved away and a crescent of sun reappeared. And again, I could feel the crowd’s energy shifting, a waft of ebullience, giddiness from having lived through a bewildering darkness and come out the other side.

What struck me then was not the moon, but the connectedness I felt to all these strangers. There are so many metaphors I could make out of this, it’s hard to know where to begin. But in these times of constant fractiousness, there was a poignancy in that moment that felt important, a sense of all of us humans as anthropological creatures who, deep in our DNA, know how to co-exist, especially under the awe of something so much greater than ourselves. And maybe I’ve been “moonstruck,” but I can’t stop hoping that there might be away out of a darkness that makes “othering” human beings and then harming those “others” acceptable.

So I’m offering this poem from Here in Sanctuary–Whirling as a starting point for contemplation. And I also invite all of us to take some time to close our eyes and envision the metaphor of the sun reappearing after totality. What can each of us do to bring back the ebullience and giddiness that comes with connection?

I DO NOT KNOW
–D. Dina Friedman

Why the wind is so fierce today. Why some people die
and others recover. Does a tornado choose its targets?
Is there a blueprint somewhere with the secret path
of my life mapped out? Will this trail I’m on
connect with the ridgeline, or will it keep crossing
the same stream? How do I get to the bunker,
and what’s hidden there now that the army no longer has it?
I do not know how dirt feels to a carrot root, or to my brother
six feet under. Is he able to read the prayer books
placed on his coffin through some double miracle
of semi-resurrection and dyslexia cured? What does it feel like
to a dyslexic when letters leave their prescribed places?
Why do bodies compartmentalize into people who love each other
hating the people across the river, who love each other
and hate the people across the river? Why do we have to teach toddlers
to share sand-buckets? Why don’t they do it naturally?
Why don’t we do it naturally?
Why don’t we do it?

In Here in Sanctuary–Whirling, Querencia Press, 2024.
Orginally published in Silkworm 15.

Support Your Local Writer

Posted on January 31, 2024 by dinafried

After a week and a half of cooking nearly every day, I still have 7 beets, 11 carrots, one huge sweet potato and one huge daikon radish. And more food to come on Saturday!

In western Massachusetts, where I live, supporting the local economy is a huge value that transcends red/blue leanings. At the top of the list is buying from local farmers. In the summer, you can find a farmers market in one of the surrounding towns almost every day of the week. They are always packed with people willing to spend a premium for the privilege of fresh, local food and the knowledge that they’re contributing to their neighbors’ labors of love. I also purchase summer and winter farm shares from various CSA farms for both myself and my children and their families. This means that at this time of year I’m basing more of my diet than I’d like on parsnips, radishes, and beets, but it’s still worth it to know I’m eating in sync with the season and supporting my community.

A second value that many of us share is supporting local businesses. While it’s often easier and sometimes cheaper to shop on-line (and I fully recognize that there are many people with various health or financial challenges for whom that’s essential), I try whenever possible to patronize local stores, often setting a challenge to myself to locally source all my holiday shopping. And since books are one of my favorite gifts to give, I end up spending a lot of my holiday shopping time at local bookstores. We have so many good ones. My favorites are (in alphabetical order): Amherst Books, Booklinks, Book Moon, Broadside, and the Odyssey Bookshop.

Independent bookstores often have an on-line component, which means you can order most books also available on Amazon through their systems. The price might be a few dollars higher than the Amazon price, but to me, that’s no different than paying a local farmer a little bit more to assure that they can meet their bottom line and stay in business.

However, not all books can be obtained at local bookstores. Many smaller independent publishers encounter obstacles or simply don’t choose to go through the extra hassle of getting their books on the Ingram distribution platform that these independent bookstores use. I had to lobby hard with my publisher before they were able and willing to get the book on Ingram–under a different ISBN, just to make things confusing–and that didn’t happen until six weeks after the book was published. In the meantime, I was grateful to the bookstores who were willing to take copies of Immigrants on consignment in order to address the concerns of many of my friends who told me they’d love to buy my book, but only if they could get it at a local bookstore. And I’m especially grateful to the Odyssey Bookshop for hosting my book launch event, now re-scheduled for February 7.

And I’m grateful to the friends who bought the book to support me, just as I try to support local writers by buying their books–another way of giving back to the community. This week I ordered three books from people I know through writing: Dean Cycon’s Finding Home: (Hungary 1945); John Sheirer’s For Now, and Eileen Cleary’s Wild Pack of the Living. I’m looking forward to reading these books. And if I like them, I’ll make to write a brief review on Goodreads and Amazon (I buy just enough from Amazon to make sure they’ll accept me as a reviewer). That’s another easy way to support a local writer. You don’t have to sound brilliant–and I generally don’t. One-to-two sentences can make a big difference.

And even if you’re not a big reader, buy a book for someone you think would enjoy it. Or buy an EP from a local musician, or a small piece of art or craft item from a visual artist. Just as we need fresh produce to nourish our bodies, we need art in all its forms to nourish our spirits. And we need to let the local artists in our community know we care.