For a Dancer (Jackson Browne)

Today is the one week anniversary of my mom's passing - I still don't feel much like "talking"... but I will soon enough, and appreciate the patience and understanding of my friends as I navigate the noisy quiet... :-)

In the meantime, you can read mom's obituary and eulogy on her CaringBridge site - I know she would have been proud of us...

SONG: For a Dancer by Jackson Browne

BOOK: Unexpected Blessings: Finding Hope and Healing in the Face of Illness by Roxanne Black

POEM: Miracle of Bubbles by Barbara Goldberg

A woman drives to the video store

to rent a movie. It is Saturday night,

she is thinking of nothing in particular,

perhaps of how later she will pop popcorn

or hold hands with her husband and pretend

they are still in high school. On the way home

a plane drops from the sky, the wing shearing

her roof of her car, killing her instantly.

Here is a death, it could happen to any of us.

Her husband will struggle the rest of his days

to give shape to an event that does not mean

to be understood. Since memory cannot operate

without plot, he chooses the romantic — how young

she was, her lovely waist, or the ironic — if only

she had lost her keys, stopped for pizza.

At the precise moment the plane spiraled

out of control, he was lathering shampoo

into his daughter's hair, blond and fine

as cornsilk, in love with his life, his

daughter, the earth (for "cornsilk" is how

he thought of her hair), in love with the miracle

of bubbles, how they rise in a slow dance,

swell and shimmer in the steamy air, then

dissolve as though they never were.

QUOTE: "The death of someone we know always reminds us that we are still alive - perhaps for some purpose which we ought to re-examine." ~ Mignon McLaughlin