I found a treasure yesterday.
I am a writer. I journal all the time. But during the last year of my mother’s life, a precious year I spent with her, I wrote very little.
This week I am in organization and spring cleaning mode and I have found some wonderful things. Including the following poem. A poem I wrote during Mom’s illness. It was during a time when the cancer had metastasized to her brain and she wasn’t herself at all. When I found this I cried and grieved all over again. Not only for my Mom, but for my Dad. That was the year he taught me the definition of real love.
Untitled
A vacuum of emptiness
Fills this room.
Laughter and warmth
Once occupied this space.
Now a human being’s mind
Dances to the tune
Of an unknown song.
Foreign melodies in her eyes.
Where is my mother?
Her smile still radiates
As a child looking at
An undiscovered place.
Her gaze stills my soul.
Thoughts crowd my mind.
Personality is gone.
Like a tidal wave separate
From the ocean,
How can personality be separate
From the total being?
Yet I see the separation.
It hurts.
At 30 years of age I thought
I knew what real love meant.
I envisioned it as warmth,
Laughter and intimacy between two.
Commitment, marriage, togetherness
All were definitions that came to mind.
But now I know.
Love cannot be defined in words, rhetoric, poetry.
Love is what I observe and feel between the two of them.
The way he holds her hands as her wrinkled fingers shake with fear.
The way she clings to him as the doctor speaks.
The gentleness in his touch as he trims the hair she no longer has.
The laughter they share as she vows, “His will be done.”
The comforting smiles as they struggle to go through all
The medical bills and insurance piles.
The tears on his cheeks as her mind dances away.
Love is NOT a movie.
It is NOT a romance novel.
It is NOT a perfume commercial.
It is NOT two people making promises.
Love is the unspoken bond that ties two people together,
When the world and its circumstances try desperately to tear them apart.
9 comments:
Beautiful! Thanks for sharing.
A prisoner of hope,
Megan
Robbie - thank you for sharing a beautiful poem written during a difficult time.
amazing. gorgeous. true.
Thank you for sharing.
Beautiful, Robbie. My father-in-law died from cancer metastisized to the brain, too. Such a tough thing to go through -- for the patient and the family both...
Beautiful, Robbie. Thanks for sharing. That was really a personal heart thing you chose to share with us.
Thank you for reminding us what love is...
I don't cry, and you made me cry. I hate poetry, and I loved your poem. Truly beautiful. Thanks Robbie.
Robbie, I have blessed you for being there when I couldn't. But I've also had to deal with envy because you got to be there and see all that love that I can just imagine. Thank you Robbie
Beautiful, powerful and very moving.
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