The Grief Resource Kit

just tells me where to find more grief, lists the ways
my heart can break but not much about how to fix it, except
that healing is no protection against memory’s wrecking ball.
It tells me grief may settle in my stomach but the ache feels
deeper – the hope, the feel, the weight of you somewhere
near, maybe in the shadows when I turn around. The kit
offers Bereavement Support Options as well. What if
what props me up is screaming, craving you, reaching
for you in the life-sucking vacuum of your gone-ness?

Note to the Bereavement Coordinator:
At the moment my bereavement is uncoordinated.
It spasms off in wild and uncontrolled directions,
an escaped mustang galloping just to get away,
No home barn lit in the dark, just running and running.

Memory’s Mirror

When I first stood in front of memory’s
mirror, it started to take my clothes off.
Jacket, fleece vest, turtleneck, long dinners,
longer summer nights, and I looked for
myself underneath, for what I remembered,
for what and who I thought I was, for you
reaching for me. Mine, those mind dreams,
so shifted, faded, dimmed. Then, naked,
I shivered. The mirror rippled, reflecting
who I thought I was then, with you for
so very long, what I thought I remembered,
what we said and did, and how we loved.
But the past is just that. Now nothing
to wear, now no idea what to put on.

The NYT Saturday Crossword

I continue solving where I left off
when I went to bed last night and the night
before, or when I oversleep and try
to jumpstart my heart with coffee.

Where I left off yesterday is where
I’ve been for weeks, trying to resolve
time, to fill in the blank spaces that fill
the days now, certain that no answer

will be published anywhere because
I will be solving for your loss and dissolving
from it every day for the future we used to
laugh at as ‘foreseeable’ and now is.

Lucia Owen is a retired English teacher living in western Maine. Until his recent death, she was the caregiver for her husband of almost forty-eight years. She began her serious writing during those last years and now works very hard to accept loss. Her work has appeared in The Cafe Review, Rust & Moth, Please See Me, The Bellevue Literary Review, THINK, and a number of anthologies, most recently Writing the Land: Maine and Purr and Yowl (World Enough Writers).