Grief Fragments is a raw, ongoing diary about being by my mother’s side as she faces terminal cancer. It is an attempt to process—and survive—grief in real-time, to stay connected to life in the midst of death, to write the unspeakable, to bear the unbearable, and to record the final months, weeks, and days I have left with my mother. I am writing for my life.
May 25, 2025
Last night, I dropped a glass bowl. It shattered on the kitchen floor—the perfect representation of my life.
I only want to lie in bed, buried under the covers, motionless. I want to be a child again. If I stay in bed, I can postpone the horror. Nothing bad can happen as long as I am safe in bed.
She wanted shaved ice. So, we got her a shaved ice machine. I made her a blue raspberry snow cone. She loved it. Something as simple as ice can make her happy.
Last night, I finished the Jane Kenyon biography. I wept as I read about Jane dying of cancer. Her poetry consoles me like nothing else right now.
(To the one reading this: if you were here with me, I would take out my book of Jane Kenyon's collected poems and read my favorites to you.)
This poem is my prayer:
Let Evening Come by Jane Kenyon
Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.
Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes up her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come.
Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.
Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.
To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.
Let it come, as it will, and don’t
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.
I want to be loved. I don't want to be alone in this world.
As painful as these days are, I know I will miss them, just as I will miss all the days I've spent with her.
Wept in bed for hours tonight. Nothing calmed me.
At dusk, I watched three deer walk through the yard. One stopped to eat flowers, made eye contact with me, and then sprinted away, dissolving into the trees.
In Memory of Jack by Jane Kenyon
Once, coming down the long hill
into Andover on an autumn night
just before deer season, I stopped
the car abruptly to avoid a doe.
She stood, head down, perhaps twenty
feet away, her legs splayed
as if she meant to stand her ground.
For a long moment she looked
at the car, then bolted right at it,
glancing off the hood with a crash,
into a field of corn stubble.
So I rushed at your illness,
your suffering and death—the bright
lights of annihilation and release.
