The Obits

Forget volumes of modern American poetry; forget Gabriel Garcia Marquez--or at least set them aside. The thing that has tweaked my emotional strings the most of late have been the memorial poems you can find in the "notices" section of any newspaper. You know the types: poems written to commemorate the anniversary of a loved one's death. They're not terribly good poems, but they invoke such a broad sweep of the circle of life that I know there's something I'm missing. Will I know what that is when I've lived to the same age as the person(s) who posted this in the paper? Obviously I'm missing out on actually having to deal with death. That will inevitably change. But as it stands I'd like to thank these obituaries for helping me climb out of a pit cut off from the rest of humanity--yes, even mainstream workaday humanity, because I'll bet you in the end there is no other kind owing to our incredible capacity to adapt. In the morning I will return to readings, AI and neuroscience where there is no room (yet) for a man commemorating the death of his wife. Once again, I said nothing about the poem being "good" in any technical sense, but you cna be sure it was heartfelt.

So consider his words: "We often think of bygone days / when we were all together. / The family chain is broken now, / but memories will live forever. / To us, she has not gone away, / nor has she travelled far, / just entered God's eternal home / and left the gate ajar."