Grief Recovery

If he had lived, our son would be two years old today.

Several close friends have had children in the past year. I have been too afraid of breaking down in front of the parents to accept invitations to meet them. Just the other day, however, we were at a restaurant and some friends came in with their nine-month-old twins. I decided I was feeling strong enough to finally meet them.

Before approaching them, I washed my hands in the bathroom, since I have been fighting off a cold. I pumped soap from the dispenser, and ran my hands under the tap. Absentmindedly, I began lathering up my wrists and rubbing furiously. I was back in the hospital, scrubbing up at the sink inside the entrance to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. Back then, I washed my hands vigorously, thoroughly, twice in a row — up to the elbows and underneath each fingernail. I shuttled over colostrum and came back with empty bottles, stole away in the night while Val was sleeping off the anesthetic, aware each visit could be the last. Every time, I scrubbed down furiously, as though some miracle of cleanliness could restore the electricity to our son’s brain.

It has not been an easy two years. But James’s death caused me to reevaluate what matters. I rediscovered the young idealist, who left the engineering department at Berkeley during the height of the dot-com era to study poetry instead. I recommitted to my writing, and signed up for an MFA. With such loss has come not only grief, but great compassion. I want to write about what makes us human, because never has it impressed upon me more that this is precious in its entirety — from my flashback in the bathroom to the radiant abandon with which infants squirm in their highchairs. There is so much to life. Sometimes it overwhelms.

I say once again: Godspeed, little James. There is so much more to love than could ever be comprehended.

This year marked the first anniversary of the passing of our son. Leading up to those difficult days, I was away at the first residency of the Pacific University MFA in writing program, shivering through an Oregon Winter. During the semester that followed, I studied with Joseph Millar, and began writing in earnest about grief, with his support. After the second residency, I studied with Sandra Alcosser, and began exploring the lyric and meditative traditions, deepening my understanding of the relationship between inner and outer experience, and therein finding a voice. I feel that I have made remarkable progress in my writing this year.

Later in the year, Pacific University’s MFA was named one of the top five low-residency programs in the country by Atlantic Monthly. This year, I also had one poem published, albeit belatedly, in our nation’s oldest literary magazine, and was a featured reader at several local venues. I also gave my first paid lecture on poetry and craft.

We returned to London this summer, and were sorry to leave. I walked in the graduation ceremony for my Doctorate in Spiritual Science, after seven years of transformative studies. And, when the 2007 Ojai Poetry Festival rolled around, I redesigned their website and orchestrated their online ticket sales.

I have written very little about technology in the past year, focusing my efforts much more on poetry and its significance, personally and universally. Still, this site has retained an audience of about four thousand unique visitors each month — although likely from a different demographic now than when my thoughts on PHP programming were widely syndicated. I have met some remarkable poets and readers through the blogosphere, and even broke down not long ago, after long resistance, to begin harassing my friends through social networking websites.

Several friends and acquaintances passed away this year, including the poet Sandford Lyne, who sped me on my way to Pacific with heartfelt encouragement and a letter of recommendation. The temporal and precious nature of life has never impressed upon me more. As the third residency of the MFA program approaches, and soon after that the second anniversary of our brief time with James, I marvel that such a rich, full year has passed, with me in it — writing, reading, loving — and learning to hope again.

I was saddened to read that technology journalist Marc Orchant passed away this afternoon, having been unconscious for several days following a major heart attack. I only met Marc once in person, but he struck me as vibrant, fit, and extremely likable. He is survived by his wife and two children. If you feel moved to help support them through what must be an incredibly challenging holiday time, details on making a donation are available here.

Marc’s was a lightning-quick creative intelligence and, coupled with his love of technology, made for stimulating conversation and insightful reading on ZDNet and, later, blognation. The blogosphere is abuzz with tributes to his memory. For my part, I would like to extend my heartfelt condolences to his family, and hope that they are buoyed up by the support of friends and family during this time.

In my lecture on “Emulation, Originality and the Writing Tradition,” I drew on Mary Oliver in A Poetry Handbook discussing a quote by Flaubert she keeps close to her writing desk, and which she originally came upon in Van Gogh’s letters: “Talent is long patience, and originality an effort of will and of intense observation.” I like this quote, because it implies that not only talent but originality are functions — not of innate gift, but of learned behaviors such as patience, will power, and intense observation. I would contend, also, that Oliver’s ability to write successfully about as timeless and universal a topic as nature depends upon, and is a function of, her own powers of intense observation.

Grief is also a timeless and universal topic. In Without, it is Donald Hall’s keenly remembered details which strike me with a harrowing veracity. He demonstrates so many of the nuances of grief through carefully chosen details, bringing me in to each experience almost tactilely. The poems in this collection work together to form a compelling narrative, however nearly any one of them could also stand alone to illustrate a variety of points about how Hall treats such a difficult subject with such startling honesty. Consider the title poem, “Her Long Illness:”

Daybreak until nightfall,
he sat by his wife at the hospital
while chemotherapy dripped
through the catheter into her heart.
He drank coffee and read
the Globe. He paced; he worked
on poems; he rubbed her back
and read aloud. Overcome with dread,
they wept and affirmed
their love for each other, witlessly,
over and over again.
When it snowed one morning Jane gazed
at the darkness blurred
with flakes. They pushed the IV pump
which she called Igor
slowly past the nurse’ pods, as far
as the outside door
so that she could smell the snowy air.

I was shocked to discover today that French PHP programmer Bertrand Gugger passed away last week due to a heart attack. Bertrand was co-lead on the Net_Monitor project with me, and contributed many valuable additions to the project, including all the SMS messaging support and end-to-end testing of European SMS messaging providers.

Bertrand was a character, to say the least. He was passionate about PHP and often had very strong opinions about how to write code well. This, combined with an imperfect grasp of English, often got him into trouble on the Pear Developer lists. Still, in the end, Bertrand and I always got along really well and he contributed some very valuable code to the Net_Monitor project as well as many other Pear projects. Whatever he did, he wanted to do right, and this commitment to writing high quality code - as well as a voracious interest in contributing to PHP development - will have implications and benefits for other PHP programmers for a long time to come.

Reading the news a week late on the Pear website drove home how little I have been involved with a community that used to be such a big part of my life. After James’s death, I began to refocus my life (and this website) on one of my original loves: poetry. And, with the growth of the company and my development team at work, I rarely delve in to actual PHP code these days.

That said, just the other day a new programmer signed on to the Net_Monitor project, and I am happy to see this work continue. Coding for love instead of money, giving something back to such an amazing community of talented programmers who have made so much possible for me in my own career and life - is a kind of lineage I have been proud to take part in. Bertrand was an important part of that lineage, right up to the end. He is survived by wife and children, who have my deepest sympathies now.

Que vous reposez en paix, Bertrand. You will be missed.

Keith Woodruff has a poignant article on his site about his new relationship to statistics since the passing of his son. I, too, have experienced a profound thinning of the security blanket of probability since our own loss. Every time I got on a plane to and from Oregon, I was keenly aware of how I now neither can nor want to go back to the kind of drowsy false security of my privileged first-world life; nor can I bear to live under constant threat in my mind.

Our nation likewise had the psychic fabric of its imperviousness rent by the attack on the Twin Towers by airplanes. It was an immeasurable tragedy. Yet other countries suffer such losses in greater numbers and more frequently; other families lose more children than those who see adulthood. How can we live, awake to such fragility, without, in the process, being crushed?

Poetry is a kind of faith. The audacity of poem-making, in a world saturated with throw-away words, a preference for television and music, and suspicious indifference to all but the ironic - is itself a profession of belief. To commit one’s life to this art in such times is as irrational as any religion. Truly, we write against the odds.

Tonight I have been reading the poems of Ilya Kaminsky - a Russian poet from Odessa, deaf since early childhood, who, a year after arriving in America with little English, lost his father suddenly. He writes about Mandelstam, Akhmatova and others who survived the un-survivable, writing poems for which they could be killed or worse. Here is a fierceness of faith in humanity. What we pass on to each other in such thin books of poems is some likelihood of greater self-understanding - and a precious likelihood of hope.

I read a range of poems, many new pieces fueled by the MFA - and even some poems about the passing of our son. It was the first time reading them in public, save for a few I read in workshop at the last residency. It felt necessary - like it was time; another stage of honoring and letting go. I also dedicated the first part of the reading to the memory of Sandford Lyne, opening with one of his poems, reading a couple new translations I had done of Machado and Neruda (two of his favorites) and ending the first section with a eulogy in honor of his great spirit.

The place was packed. Roe, our indefatigable host, joked that the event was a sell-out just like Mary Oliver’s reading last week (though Cambell Hall admittedly does hold one or two more people than the Gallery). Still, it was nice to see standing room only. More high praise and fond support: Doris brought her cookies and of course left with an empty bowl. I could not have had a more supportive group in which to read such intimate and personal poems.

Seeing Li-Young Lee read from his own deeply sorrowful, grief-stricken poems last week gave me a model for what it means to honor the experience and honor the art even though it is deeply personal. I felt in some way that seeing him read gave me the strength to do what I had to do tonight.

Earlier today, I heard from my father that Sandford Lyne - poet, teacher and friend - passed away this morning. He went quietly in his own home, having made his peace with this world. I will miss him fiercely.

After graduating from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the early ’70s, he went on to teach poetry at the University of Virginia and then to lead countless poetry workshops for students and teachers all over the country. Most recently, he led workshops for children sheltering in sports stadiums during the aftermath of hurricane Katrina.

We met through my parents, and bonded in part over a mutual love of Spanish-language poets. One of my favorite poems of his, “Machado, Lorca, Neruda, Jiménez”, is currently still available on his website.

Sandy wrote one of my letters of recommendation to the Pacific University MFA program in which I am now studying. I signed away my right to read it, but he sent me an extra copy anyway. He wanted me to know what he thought. If I ever doubt myself as a poet, I have but to reread that letter.

Sandy touched many lives - over 50,000 children and thousands of teachers as well, and shared his delight in poetry issuing from the mouth of babes in his well-known compilation of children’s poems, Ten Second Rainshowers.

Though we only met in person a handful of times, I still recall his immense kindness and generosity, and that distant, Blakean gaze he took on in moments of quiet reverie. I’d like to think whatever beauty he saw there, beyond the horizon of rational thought, he has now become part of, and more - what Mary Oliver calls the great, unending stream of voices that is poetry.

Thank you, dear Sandy, for honoring us all with your life.

It has been one year since the birth of our son, and in three days’ time, it will be the first anniversary of his passing. My mother raised me to always write thank-you notes for gifts I received. His was one of the greatest so far in my short life.

Foremost, he helped me to rearrange my priorities into something far more human. I have experienced, although briefly, the selfless love of fatherhood. And I know loss. The hustle and buzz of technology, the pleasures of the mind alone - no longer hold so much sway. More and more humanity seems like a single organism to me. More and more, I feel compassion, poignancy - how much everything matters that is done with love.

I came back to poetry after a four year hiatus, and upped the ante by enrolling in an MFA program. It hasn’t been anything like an easy year - even now as I’m writing this, I’m quite sick and somewhat miserable. Yet the effect of such profound love and loss this year is something I would not trade. I can’t be sure I’ll keep feeling this way in the coming three days, or even in the coming years. It’s been pretty rocky at times so far. But when I get down to the heart of this experience, strange as it sounds, I am grateful.

Thank you, James. And Godspeed.

When my wife found out the International Museum Of Women asked me to submit a poem, she didn’t miss a beat: “You go girl!” In actuality, they are preparing an exhibit featuring the art of young men as an analogue to their recent and highly successful “Imagining Ourselves” exhibit featuring young women.

I just learned that the poem I wrote specifically for the Fatherhood part of this series has been accepted as part of the exhibit. Audio of me reading the poem as well as commentary and conversations about the work are available here. (Note: the website misrepresents my line breaks - all lines with only 1-3 words on them should be a continuation of the previous line.)