Becky

 

Photo © 2023 Jennifer Wagner

She’s been gone

for a long time now.

 

A few summers ago

we visited the house in Valpo

where they’d lived as a young family

when the current occupant let us in

 

to look around

in what had been an old funeral parlor

they’d made a home

with a visiting bat.

 

I love that.

 

I wish I could have heard her laugh there.

In fact, I never got to meet her, and

she never got to hold her grandsons.

I’d have liked to have held her hand

when they were born.

 

But, Gretchen gave me

the little book of poems

she’d taken of her things,

all those long years ago,

pressing a flower from her casket

between the pages

never knowing what a memorial it would be—

 

a reminder

of how she still gets inside us

in each of those boys’ smiles.

 

She’s been gone

for a long time now.

But still here.

 

And I love that, too.

 

 

© 2023 Jennifer Wagner

 

My husband’s beautiful mom passed away at the very young age of 31.  When she died, his aunt took Rod McKuen’s book, Caught in the Quiet, from among her things and pressed a bloom from her casket in the pages of the poem “thirty-one.”  She gave me the book, and a way to hold her hand.

 

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