Category Archives: grief

Grandma, Dance!

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Once again, I was in the middle of preparing a blog post on my submissions stats from 2025. And once again, life happened. Or, should I say, death happened.

Renee Nicole Good. 37 years old. A poet, and the mother of three young children.  Sitting in her car as a legal observer during an ICE raid in Minneapolis. Shot four times in the face after being harassed by ICE agents as she attempted to drive away.

The feds are spinning this story by painting her as a domestic terrorist who was trying to run over ICE agents with her vehicle. An outright lie, but what else would you expect from an administration who had the audacity to rewrite the events of January 6? The videos made by numerous bystanders show otherwise. No ICE agents were in the vehicle’s path as she attempted to escape. The person who shot her–four times in the face–was standing by the side of the car, not in its path. And besides, as my partner pointed out so matter-of-factly, if you want to stop a car, you don’t need to shoot the occupant. You can shoot the tires.

And after she had collapsed and crashed into a utility pole, ICE refused to allow a physician in the crowd to provide medical treatment, claiming they had their own medics, who, at the moment, were nowhere to be found.

I first read accounts of this story yesterday, sitting in the dark in my grandson’s room while he napped. And two things came to mind. First was a blurry melange from Schindler’s List and other Holocaust movies where Nazi guards randomly and blithely shot any Jew who wasn’t immediately conforming to whatever order was given.

The second was an event that happened to me when I was about Renee’s age. I was backing out of a parking space with my one-year-old in the car, when all of a sudden I heard this man knocking on my trunk. You hit me! he shouted. He told me he had fallen from the impact and re-injured his knee. Mortified, I dropped off the baby to my partner at home, a few blocks away, then drove the man to the ER. When he said he didn’t need me to come and wait with him, I drove to the police station to report the accident. When I gave the name of the victim, the policeman rolled his eyes. That guy’s a known scammer. I’d be very careful, he said. He probably didn’t even go into the ER. You probably didn’t even hit him.

And I had stupidly just shown him exactly where I lived!

The next day he called me and asked for money for medical expenses. I took the easy way out. I met him in town with cash.

I was lucky. I never heard from the man again. I have my life. I watched my children grow up, as Renee never will. The feds’ story circulating about Renee, embellished and exaggerated by Kristi Noem and Donald Trump, is another scam. A scam of out-of-control proportions, which if people start believing it, will give ICE the authority to keep randomly shooting anyone they deem “non-compliant”–to be no different than the Nazi guards were, needing no justification to shoot anyone they pleased.

So today, I’m wearing dark colors, feeling a different kind of grief, a stunned sadness punctured with fear for my country. Renee’s death is not the only senseless death of a protesting activist. I think of Rachel Corrie in Gaza, Heather Heyer in Charlottesville. And I think of the hundreds of African-Americans murdered by authoritarian police for no cause: George Floyd, Sandra Bland, Daunte Wright, Breonna Taylor, Stephon Clark–just to name a few. More profiles and stories are here.

I hope all the readers of this blog–those of you who are inclined toward political action and those of you who aren’t–will think of one thing you can do in response to Renee’s death and this unraveling trajectory towards authoritarianism. Call your Congresspeople. (Jessica Craven has a script here), attend a vigil, write a poem, as Cyn Grace Sylvie did in yesterday’s poetic resistance blog, Second Coming, or make a piece of art. Post your responseon social media/and or share it with friends. Share this blog. Or share something else that might speak to you more deeply.

After I first read the news story about Renee yesterday, I only had a few minutes to absorb the severity of it all before my grandson woke up and wanted listen to clips of his favorite band, The Tokyo Paradise Ska Orchestra (an odd choice for a 3-year-old, but that’s where he’s at). He has about 50 cuts on the playlist his parents made for him, and was happy to put them on shuffle and see what came next.

Grandma, dance! He kept shouting as he bounced up and down to the beat,  a different stuffed animal in his arms for each song.

I didn’t feel like dancing. But this is life.

And as I bobbed around, I realized one more time, that this is why we must keep fighting. So we can dance.

Carolmooredc, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

If I can’t dance, then I don’t want to be part of your revolution.–Emma Goldman

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Reflections on a Year of Loss

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Happy New Year! I was intending to write my annual post of my submissions stats for the year (which I will do in the near future) but a prompt suggested by poet Meg Hartmann, who offers a self-led write-a-poem-every-day course and other goodies for writers on her website Ah The Sea, led me in a completely different direction. The prompt, by sheer coincidence, turned out to be a line from my first writing teacher and long-time mentor, Pat Schneider, founder of Amherst Writers & Artists.

What could be more generous than a window? 

I have a gorgeous set of floor-length sliding windows in my dining room, where I often work in the winter in order to take in the maximum amount of sun. Looking out that window, I ended up meandering down a wider path and considering all of 2025–the good, the bad, and the ugly.

For me personally, the salient event of 2025 was my father’s death on March 1. Despite my gratitude for his long life (he was 93) and relatively short illness before his passing; and despite our not being exceptionally close even though our overall family bonds were strong, I couldn’t shake the feeling that a foundation of my world had come undone. My father’s illness and death, as well as its aftermath, have forged me into an entirely new relationship with my mother. Before 2025, I’d speak to both my parents on the phone every week or two, casually recounting the newsy highlights of my life while they shared theirs. This past year, I spoke to my mother no less than every other day: at first providing emotional and logistical support in navigating my father’s care, and then, after his death, occasionally helping her problem-solve life’s relentless administrative demands but mostly providing someone to talk to in the unbearable dark loneliness of isolation.

This has made me so grateful for my partner, Shel, and our 46-year relationship. I have major hermitic tendencies (and I’m grateful that he’s learned to dance around them) but ultimately, I will always choose connection over isolation.

I’m also grateful that my mother, at age 91, is cognitively sharp and physically able to care for herself. As with my father, my mother and I are not exceptionally close, though we share the same family-bonded loyalty. And we probably have less in common than my father and I did in terms of personality, outlook and values. But I’m determined to be the best daughter I can be and provide whatever support I can in this inconceivable transition. (My parents were married for 72 years.)

As I look out the window and watch 2025 recede into the distance, I can’t close out this reflection without considering how many people in our country have suffered losses, even if, due to luck and privilege, I haven’t been as deeply affected: loss of safety due to hate crimes and ICE overreach, loss of economic security, loss of access to health care, loss of access to food, loss of due process. I continue to be distraught as news story after news story reinforces the conjecture that cruelty is not only a result of the administration’s policies–it is the point. Yet, I’m hoping that some of the pundits are correct in predicting that the swelling tide of resistance will continue to rise in 2026.

Happy New Year! May it be joyful, peaceful, and cruelty-free! And may all your windows be generous!

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The Art of Losing…

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My intent today was to write not about the fog of grief that’s encapsulated me in so many ways over the past two months, but about the process of clawing back my life. Yet, this morning in one of my favorite Zoom writing groups, I think it was one of those spiritually serendipitous accidents that Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, The Art of Losing, was offered as a lead-in to the writing prompt.

Lose something every day, Bishop writes, evoking objects as mundane as door keys and as complex as rivers.

And in her last verse:

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

We’re in that all-too-short week of spring where everything’s blooming, but nothing’s quite leafed out, and yesterday, on a walk at the Bachelor Brook conservation area, I was wowed by the beauty of the tableau–the young spring green buds draping over the marshy water, the array of skunk cabbage sprouting tall on either side of the boardwalk that seemed to be smiling at us, the way the sun shone on the young saplings, bringing out the silver hues, and overlooking it all, my friends, the beeches–those thick trunked, wise elders.

Photo by Shel Horowitz

Photo by Shel Horowitz

“I love this!” I said to Shel, my partner, grateful for a moment where I could find a sliver of genuine unadulterated happiness! “I love these trees!”

Photo by Shel Horowitz

And then, as if channeling my father’s voice, I added, “Except that one over there…”

It was just the kind of thing he would say. Like, “The food’s good, except for the taste.”

Yet, Bishop insists, in her closing line of every other verse of this villanelle (as required by the form) that the art of losing is not a disaster. Objects, places, people disappear from our lives, and somehow we go on. And while we might be able to replace the set of door keys, all we have left of the places and the people are the memories.

But this is where we can each turn to our own art to process the art of losing–expressing our feelings obliquely or directly through drawing, writing, music, dancing…

And in the process, claw back our lives.

Photo by Shel Horowitz

I say this having not written very much about my father or about anything in the past two months–other than these blog entries, because my schoolgirl self is committed to satisfying the Substack Bot that demands weekly posts. But I have been playing music with a different kind of intentionality, releasing what I can’t yet find words to express.

And I’ve gone back to more of my daily self-care routines of morning exercise and breathing practice, daily woods walking, and nightly music and meditation. It’s amazing how much these ground me and actually make me more productive and focused, despite how much time they take out of my day.

Most importantly, they make me feel normal. And even if in world events, where the second part of my grief lies festering, things are anything but normal right now, I cannot do my small but necessary part in addressing them unless I feel like my settled self.

I certainly haven’t mastered the art of losing, despite Bishop’s claim that it isn’t hard, but I’m slowly finding my way through the fog, with a lot more sun predicted in the upcoming forecast.

Taking the Plunge

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One of the parts of the Passover seder I resonate with most is the story of Nachsun. Nachsun was at the head of 600,000 Israelites running away from Pharaoh’s army when he came to the frothy waters of the Red Sea–the end of the road marked by angry waves and deep water stretching all the way out to the horizon.

But, rather than succumb and turn back to the horrors of slavery, Nachsun plunged into the water. And it was only after this courageous act that God told Moses to lift his staff and part the waters, enabling the rest of the Israelites to cross over on the dry path.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/st-stev/2432121049

According to some Biblical scholars, “Nachsun’s name has become synonymous with courage and the will to do the right thing,” even when it’s f*ing scary.

So, I’ve been thinking about Nachsun as I read as much as my stomach and soul will let me: ICE smashing car windows to make arrests, taking random people who have legal status when they can’t find the ones they were looking for, arresting a man at his citizenship appointment, and grabbing an international student off the streets for having views that differ with the government, and defying Supreme Court orders and refusing to return a man who was sent to a prison in El Salvador by error.  In fact, there has been no due process for anyone sent to prison in El Salvador, and now the government is threatening to send U.S. citizens there, as well.

These are only a few of the incidents. There are more people effected, and more stories. What I learned from visiting the border in 2020 is that everyone had a personal story that made me cry and tug at my hair and fall into an awe-struck paralysis where there just were no words to fathom the cruelty of human beings.

But the people I met in 2020 were fleeing cruelty in their countries of origin. Here in 2025, they–and we–are facing an equal if not greater cruelty from our country, our fellow Americans, people that we (collectively) elected, whose lawlessness we continue to enable each day with our fear and our silence, whether or not we voted for them.

So, I’m pondering… how can we… how can I… be like Nachsun and jump into the water. Even if it’s cold and rough. Even if my swimming ability is shaky.

How can I keep my head above the rough waters and shout, NOT IN MY NAME!

Not in my name as an American, and not in my name as a Jew who rejects the contorted use of antisemitism as an excuse for this barbaric behavior and understands that the definition of a concentration camp, “a guarded compound for the mass detention without hearings or the imprisonment without trial of civilians, refugees, members of ethnic minorities, political opponents, etc.” fits this situation far too well.

In the Passover liturgy, the word for Egypt, Mitzrayim, refers to “The Narrow Place,” and some of the observance consists of reflecting on how each of us as individuals can get past the obstacles that constrict us and emerge into a wider and more abundant state of being.

I’m thinking we need to do this as a country, maybe even as a species.

How can we stop being cruel? How can we jump into the water and believe that some hidden internal goodness–divinely inspired or otherwise–will save us?

Diving Back In

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Yesterday, for the first time since my father died, I dived back into my writing.

Actually, it was my poetry critique group on Monday that started the waters churning. I had to come up with a poem, so I started looking through some old ones, and found one that reflected the grief I was feeling, even though I’d written the poem several months ago–after the election, but way before my father took a turn for the worse. Yet, the grief in the poem was so raw, my poetry group was surprised that it wasn’t a new poem. I guess grief has been in the air for a while, as the foundations of the country continue to rumble.

To tell the truth, I’d forgotten I’d even written this poem. I was simply pawing through my files of dribs and drabs, musings and snippets, trying to come up with something that felt like it had potential and held my interest enough to talk about. I got some good feedback–enough to bring the poem up a level or two. But more importantly, I got tacit permission to spend yesterday meandering through my piles of words, reordering, adding on, sloughing off, sewing together a few more poems for the “Send Out” file, piling up others to kiss goodbye before relegating them to the file marked “Inactive.” and leaving the vast majority in the file marked, “Poems to Work On,” but with the magical expectation that at least some of the changes I made might nudge them closer to send-out status soon.

Poet Molly Peacock, in a biography of Mary Delany, who invented the art of mixed-media collage in the 1700s, wrote,  “Having a collection, taking it out, looking at it, reordering it, and putting it away is creative in itself. It doesn’t yield a product, like the results of an art, but stops time, as making art does.” 

My style of writing poetry is somewhat like collage. I often seek to combine disparate images and make them add up to a whole. But more importantly, yesterday morning, for a few hours I stopped time as I took a few small steps away from my personal grief and the grief I’m feeling for our nation. Did I create art? That remains to be seen. Was the grief still there when I stepped back in? Absolutely, but I’m beginning to clear away the fallen branches and tangled vines and find a small path forward.

After my little writing vacation, I turned to some activism tasks I also hadn’t been able to do in the past few weeks: drafted a letter to the editor from our immigration justice group and wrote two call-to-action entries for Rogan’s List. It’s still hard not to get paralyzed by the enormity of it all, but taking time to put words together in a hopefully coherent manner made me feel empowered, rather than disheartened.

This morning, I’ve taken another step in returning to normalcy, writing with some of my favorite pals in the Forbes Library Zoom Group, where my friend and colleague, Tzivia Gover, with whom I’ve co-blogged a few times, introduced the quote above. Tzivia sent me this beautiful sympathy card featuring one of Mrs. Delany’s collages. I’m looking forward to reading The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delany Begins Her Life’s Work at 72.

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