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    Wild Things: Poems of Grief and Love, Loss and Gratitude
    Wild Things: Poems of Grief and Love, Loss and Gratitude
    Wild Things: Poems of Grief and Love, Loss and Gratitude
    Ebook225 pages1 hour

    Wild Things: Poems of Grief and Love, Loss and Gratitude

    By Roberta Bondi

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    About this ebook

    "Grief is such a messy thing," Roberta Bondi writes in the introduction. "It fills us with so many ideas and images, memories and fantasies, celebration and bitter regret all at once all superimposed upon one another. No wonder it wears us out."

    In this book of poetry and reflections on her mother's death, Bondi acknowledges her grief in the presence of God over the span of a few months. She expresses many conflicting feelings: love, pain, anger, guilt, emptiness, confusion, exhaustion, relief that her mother was no longer suffering. As she celebrates her mother's life and wrestles with her own sense of loss and longing, she ponders the mystery of life, death, and God's presence everyday all around us in nature as well as in relationships.

    Even though we may feel isolated in our grief, we do not grieve alone, Bondi reminds us. In this firsthand account of her grief, Bondi offers a gift to all who are grieving—comfort and help with accepting the forward and backward movements of grief and loss.

    Wild Things will also be a valuable resource for those seeking to aid and comfort the grieving: pastors, counselors, chaplains, hospice workers, and family and friends of those dealing with loss.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUpper Room Books
    Release dateJul 1, 2014
    ISBN9780835813655
    Wild Things: Poems of Grief and Love, Loss and Gratitude
    Author

    Roberta Bondi

    Roberta C. Bondi is Professor Emerita at Candler School of Theology, Emory University. She will be recognized for several "firsts" at Candler School of Theology in fall 2014, including that she was the first woman who attained tenured faculty status. A graduate of Oxford University and Southern Methodist University, Roberta is married with 2 children and 2 grandchildren.

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      Book preview

      Wild Things - Roberta Bondi

      Introduction for My Readers

      Mama’s death shocked me. It shocked my whole being, body and soul, to lose my mother. It wasn’t a surprise; she was two days short of her ninety-sixth birthday, after all, but it was impossible to prepare myself in advance. I acknowledged the peculiarly inescapable quality of mother-daughter relationships as my grandmothers and great-grandmothers, aunts and great-aunts, as well as my mother, always described it. Now I had found it out for myself: when mother died, there was too much to feel; there were too many losses to grieve, to remember, to think about, to pray over; and also too many contradictory experiences and emotions to carry at once without bursting open.

      Twenty years ago, my primary means of surviving Mama’s death and living in it would have come through writing about it. The last book I had written caused great pain inadvertently to a lot of people I loved, and I had utterly lost my taste for writing. I walked away from it. In losing my writing, however, I seemed to have lost a vital part of myself, and I grieved this loss deeply.

      Then Mama died, and I suddenly discovered that my words had been given back to me. I began to write again. Where the well had been dry, now poems rose up in me and overflowed. With the new words came an easing of pain (some days more than others), gratitude for my mother’s gifts and our seventy-one years together, a sense of the great mystery of life and death, of loss, of the goodness of God, of the erasing of time in our human love for each other. With these words, spoken in my heart before they were ever written down, came long-forgotten memories of times that sucked me back into them as though they were taking place in the present. And then I experienced a heightened awareness in my ability to see—really see—what was around me and also to smell and taste and sense touch.

      All these sensations, I know now, characterize not just my own grief but common grief in the face of loss. Grief sears our hearts but can also bring great gifts. The fact that we would gladly exchange those gifts for the lives of our beloved dead does not make them less real. They are precious, perhaps to be received in no other way. We may reject them or accept them with a gratitude that comes as the greatest gift of all, for gratitude is not an attitude we can produce simply by gritting our teeth.

      When we grieve, we seldom grieve alone. I was not thinking about this fact at all the week before Mama died. In fact, my pain seemed to be my own, mine and that of my brothers and sisters, children, and nieces and nephews. By the time of Mama’s funeral and memorial service, I had come to my senses and could pay attention. Very soon I knew in every cell of my body that we all suffer grief, but in this time of suffering we find ourselves solidly sustained by one another, by those we know and those we will never know, by all who live and have ever lived, whom we love and who love us without our even realizing it.

      Not surprisingly, I wasn’t thinking of you, my readers, when I first began my poems. It never occurred to me that as we sustain one another in our grieving, my writing that proved so useful to me would be useful to others as well. Furthermore, if other people could find my words useful for understanding or comforting or giving words to their grief, it would be a gift for both of us. I sincerely hope this happens for you. While this book has been written from the perspective of one who grieves, I am hoping that others can also benefit from it. I’m thinking of those who might one day grieve, which I assure you will be all of us in this world. I’m also thinking of those who seek to aid and comfort those who do grieve now: pastoral counselors and other therapists; hospice workers; chaplains, spiritual directors; ministers and seminarians; and the family and friends of those undergoing loss.

      I can’t presume to tell you what do do with these poems—they are a gift, after all—but I have a few suggestions for how you might use them, which I will get to in a moment. First, I would like to tell you a little about my Mama, whose loss has brought all this about, and my relationship with her.

      About Mama

      Mama was born in 1917 on a small farm in Union County in western Kentucky, in the family house we always heard called the House on the Hill. She was the oldest child of seven children, a girl born into a very large extended family that was a matriarchy. Her own mother, whom my family members called Panny, was the oldest child as well as the oldest girl in her generation. This large farming family was close, hard-working (there is no other way to live on a farm), cheerful, competitive, full of humor. There were also lawyers sprinkled around, as there still are, and an occasional doctor, but basically life entailed life on the farm.

      To my knowledge, mother was the first one of us (and the last of her generation) to go off to take up life in the big city. I am not sure how Mama felt about it at first, but Panny was determined that her first daughter would make something of herself in the wide world. Panny sent Mama to commercial school in Louisville to learn to be a secretary. After graduation she went farther away still, taking a job in Cincinnati, Ohio. Not long after that, she met my father, an exotic young man who had grown up in Manhattan.

      Mama was crazy about him, and within two months they had married. Two years later I was born, then my brother Fred after four more years, and Wesley ten years later.

      Within the next few years my mother and father lived in Birmingham, Alabama; the borough of Queens in New York; and finally Wilmington, Delaware. Tragically, after fourteen years of marriage, these two proud people who truly loved each other divorced. Mama never got over it.

      And Mama was, indeed, proud. As a woman who had spent all her married years as a housewife, she suddenly found herself with enormous grief, little money, rusty skills, and three children to support—children for whom she had high hopes. The early 1950s was a bad time to find herself in this position.

      But mother was indomitable, as she was all her life. After a brief return to her parents’ farm, she settled us in Louisville, Kentucky, enrolled us in school, and with the help of my Great-Aunt Nacky (who was great in about every way you could name) returned to secretarial school for a refresher course and then got herself a job. Later, while I was in college, again with Aunt Nacky’s help, Mama got a college degree herself. Amazingly, she supported us all on her salary through the years, along with some child support money. There was no extra money, but we had what we needed, including mother’s constant expectation that we three would go to college and eventually make something of ourselves. How she did it, I don’t know. But by the time we did go to college, with the help of scholarships, she had saved what we needed for school. All three of us ended up with advanced degrees, which, while we were in school and not earning incomes, I am fairly sure she often felt was a bit much, even for her ambitious dreams for us.

      As is true in so many mother-daughter relations, my relationship with Mama was not always easy: tight bonds can make for irritability or worse, as well as situations in which it is hard for the daughter to tell where mother ends and she begins, and vice versa. How many times I heard her say, and never positively, When you act like that, it reflects on me!

      In the 1950s people highly valued being normal, and, for one reason or another, I didn’t make the cut. Mama expected me to grow up and be a housewife, cooking well, ironing the sheets, keeping the baseboards clean, raising babies, obeying my husband—just as she had intended for herself. That is what women were supposed to do with their lives. There was no women’s movement yet, at least none available to me, but I knew I couldn’t live this life that had nearly broken my mother when she was divorced. I believe she wanted more for me, but at the same time, she wanted me to be a woman with the gifts and skills of my high-achieving, farm-women

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