An Excuse-Spouting Bush Is Busted by 9/11 Report
So, before 9/11, incompetence and sloth. And after? Much worse: a war without end on the wrong battlefield.

that is one travesty of a president.
- posted by barbara @ 7/27/2004 10:43:00 PM  0 comments

 
grief and me
07-26-04, 6:57 a.m.

Actors gotta act, players gotta play, writers gotta write! RIGHT.
This makes the first time I’ve put pen to paper two days in a row
in quite some time.

I am up shaking the blank from my brain. Gotta be at work at 8:30.

This IS a good thing Bekah-la. For Rory as well as for myself.
The resistance remains, but – I am stronger than that.

This is another measure of recovery. To me, the acknowledgments,
both of the continuing resistance and of my power to rise above
it are hallmarks of what initially engendered it. Which is to
say the grief.

Grief came to stay, with a mission:
See if you can make this mother die.
So we commenced our struggling,
Grief and me.
All the ways, every way, that wet and hurtful way
We began to forge a peace,
All the days, thousands of days,
We played tug of war with this mother’s vitality.
All the nights, thousands of nights,
We crawled around like parasites

Inside each other’s tissues…
Awesome, awful issues at play, continue to play.
Grief is not bitterness, grief is not pure pain…
It is more the living body of bereavement
Wherein all cruelty gathers together with
A smattering of wisdom, a hunger for love,
A turning of the head toward the past,
Where it didn’t used to be. The mother’s task:
Turn the head of grief toward tomorrow,
Carry it forward, nurture it into sorrow,

Suck its wisdom, soften it with
Celebrations, memories, sog it with tears,
Let it in, recognize: Grief came to stay, or to
Take the mother away to nowhere.
So, grow with grief. Befriend the monster,
Defend your love your memory
Your joy your vitality, until finally,
Grief cuddles with you comfortably,
Adjusts its sights to the new reality, emerges willingly
Beside you, in the light of recovery.

Baby I want to work this one but cannot do it right this second.

So many apt conceits. Last night I was thinking, “You can take
the mother away from the cemetery, but you cannot take the
bereavement out of the mother.”

And yet there are ways for the mother to live after all. And
Bekah-la it is the STONE truth and the most telling truth as
well: I thank you for showing me the way. I love you eternally
amen
XXXOOO
mom
- posted by barbara @ 7/26/2004 11:45:00 PM  0 comments

 
i have tried to get a painting up here and it just won't work...

chase the day we got him - he was about 10 weeks old, two and 1/2 pounds. he must be pushing four pounds by now, a day after his six month birthday...:)
Posted by HelloAn Amateur Mourning Map for Mothers of the Recently Murdered

The terrain is extensively traveled,
Though to my knowledge never charted.
Trust your reluctance,
Grip the remains of your faith,
Know you have no choice.

Mourning begins at Shock Summit and wends its way
Across Hills of Horror to the door of the mortuary.
There you celebrate and prepare to bury your
Slain child, after which those who sustained you
From the first phone call to the funeral fade,
Even as the flowers are fresh on your baby's grave.

The living return to their lives and you alone
Enter the Desert of Despair at the section where
Only mothers of the murdered gain admittance.
The apparition beside you is either your dead child,
Or a hallucination grown from your desire.

Either way cling to that apparition.
Step in line with the many mothers
Forced on this treacherous trek
Fraught with troughs of tormented thought
Toward all of tomorrow bereft.
Can you trust a moment of post-mortem joy
That visits you in your sleep?
Will you ever want to be awake again?

Admittedly I've not traveled that far.
I have surveyed a span a bleak that
Challenges that dares that forces me though stricken to move
Not a room, not a street
Not a moving crowd of mourners,
But an eternity imposed upon and enclosed
Within a lifetime -
A lifetime left to hold a death within.

My life, that gave life, which was then
Robbed by a person who killed and still lives,
Moves slowly but necessarily
Toward the conveyance of its finest fertility
And fiercest love, to the other side
Weighted, shaded, dressed for a funeral,
Crying, keening, asking why.
Lingering longingly beside a blank infinity
That was supposed to hold her child's life.

this is my son andy at his boot camp grad in april 2003, and courtesy of PSP, his grandfather, my dad, in 1941, when he graduated boot camp in the navy
Posted by Hello.
- posted by barbara @ 7/24/2004 06:22:00 AM  0 comments

 
Random Foo Pictures
new page, new business...check out CC's movie page.
- posted by barbara @ 7/22/2004 06:07:00 AM  0 comments

 
Massive Head-wound Cory
cory - in recovery - and perhaps it is a testament to positive thinking, focusing on the positive, refusing to give in to self-pity. i dunno, but am very happy to hear the news.
- posted by barbara @ 7/22/2004 06:06:00 AM  0 comments

 
Yahoo! Groups : bekah Messages : Message 713 of 713
hello to all who still visit...today is the 3rd anniversary of bekah's
death.

i cannot believe it's been three years; really cannot.

rory and i just got back from the cemetery and it's 8 pm ... in
another hour and 45 minutes we will observe a minute of silence.
though it may be broken by my tears.

this day hit hard. time helps but only so much, i guess.

love to all and forever, to bekah my girl

bekah's mom barbara
- posted by barbara @ 7/19/2004 08:20:00 PM  0 comments