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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.