In October, my publisher’s essay spoke about the way I wrote and read poetry to help me after losing my 25-year-old son Seth in a snowboarding accident on December 27, 2000:

When I finished one particular poem, I saw that not only did I hurt from profound helplessness to keep Seth from dying, I also feared losing my memories of him, another death. With the sun once again in my poem, I also realized how much the affirmation of its coming again after darkness meant to me.

This December 27th, Kurt and I went, as we have for six years now, to watch the sun rise from our son’s memorial benches outside the Port Townsend Marine Science Center overlooking Admiralty Inlet to the Cascade Mountains. More often than not, we have witnessed exquisite sunrises. But even when there have been cloudy skies, subtle light brings divinity into relief, sometimes in the shape of animals in the large stones nearby. Other times, we’ve been accompanied by a hawk hovering over the portico that covers the benches.

This year, we took our places on the memorial benches a half hour before sunrise. We watched daylight break from behind a mostly cloudy sky, and at dawn, we got up from the benches and walked across the road and onto a long pier that extends into Admiralty Inlet. We heard a bird calling persistently, “Look my way! Look my way!” And when we did, we saw the black bird sitting on the top of a piling off to our right, a white patch on its neck, clear even from a distance. Then the bird flew south along the shoreline, a foot over the water, swallow-like but at high speed. When it was out of view, I looked north again and saw a hawk circling.

At the end of the pier, we looked out over Admiralty Inlet. I watched the water below us swell and undulate with an unusual pattern and rhythm and what seemed like a kind of affection. The movement did not correspond with any wave action or tidal currents. The swelling of the water became the backs of dolphins or of whales, so compelling, I could imagine riding one of them. I thought of the Orca totem Seth painted on the front of the kayak he built at 17.

We watched a tugboat pulling a loaded barge from the Strait of Juan de Fuca into Admiralty Inlet. It looked like a friendly, furry monster from a children’s book, with a crane that lay on its side for a tail and a bright lamp for an eye. I wished I could be standing there with the children Seth and his finance Kristen would have had by now.

As Kurt and I walked back along the pier toward our car, I asked if he had seen anything in the water, and he described being mesmerized by an unusual undulation and swelling. I felt certain that what we had witnessed was there for us because of the change in our beings on this day, our heightened sense of belonging to a whole, the sense that allows us to locate Seth, to fully feel his presence.

 At home, I got out my bird books with the hope of identifying the one we had listened to and watched. I went to the Internet. Descriptions of the White Collared Vaux seemed to match the bird we had seen, though the species isn’t said to winter here. As I looked at the pictures of the black Vaux with a thick white patch at its neck, memories of Seth came– an eighth-grade boy standing outside of a French restaurant in his black pants and white shirt waiting for us to drive him home from his new busboy job and from that same year, the sight of him standing on the school stage in black pants and white shirt to dance with his school’s folkdance troupe, surprised to enjoy it so much.

I spent much of the rest of the morning rereading poems I’d written about Seth over the years of his growing up. I resonated with the one I wrote in the months just after he left home for college, because it was about living without him but feeling him everywhere, and it opened with a bird image:

Buying a Birthday Card for My Son Just After He’s Gone to College

For Seth on his 18th birthday

With each card I look at, I think of your phone calls, the way
they dart unexpectedly into my afternoons like sparrows.
I imagine the dorm room you describe, the rented refrigerator,
food carried from the dining hall, bed rigged to hang over your desk,
your stereo components integrated with ones your roommate brought.

As I listen, I think backwards, see you at 18 months in your cot
before tangerine striped wallpaper, your bib overalls on the floor,
pockets full of garden snails and twigs. Today, I hold a birthday
greeting book in my hand, flip the pages fast to see an animation
of candles lit and blown so hard the birthday cake slides into a lap.

Memories come of you sliding into my lap, pleading with me
to play cars, make engine noises, grind wheels over floors, watch
plastic smash into baseboards, of you running in cleats over muddy
Saturday soccer fields, chubby in your orange and black uniform.

Then I see you older, in summer carrying a wind surfing board
towards water, not telling us how afraid you are there might
be sharks and in the fall refusing rides I offer, insisting on using
your own two wheels, though it is dark and cold at midnight.

Then you get a perfect score on your driver’s test, proud shoulders
straight as the bar on trapeze. You drive away and I pass through rooms
with your gifts from over the years, drawings in blue and red and yellow, copper
crab in the center of our dining table, deer shaped candleholder,
glass otters and humming birds, the book about mountain biking you
left for me to read since you aren’t here to coax me up the high curbs.

At his benches I told Seth, as I do every year, that I love him. Before Nootka roses and snowberry that form a backdrop to the Science Center building, below the fir and cedar tree-covered bluff that rises above it, I touched the love in me as strong as ever, and I thanked my son for the commitment and the energy he brought to his life.

As I write now, my thoughts turn to Kristen’s coming marriage this September, just short of seven years since the accident, the amount of time a widow she had asked told her it would take to feel strong. I think of my four-and-a-half year-old grandson Toby coming to visit us soon for “five days and four nights,” as he excitedly describes his plans. I think of his brother, Raphael, now sixteen months old, able to speak many words, of which my favorite, of course, is “Ganma.”

Seth, an architect, would have loved designing and building for his nephews and his own kids; he would have loved visiting our home, where they could all hike and beach comb and kayak. I know that he would have loved every minute of being a father. Honoring his spirit keeps my senses open to this world. It is essential if I am to make it up loss’s high curbs and recognize the gifts in this life.

A couple of days after we sat on the benches, a visiting friend of ours read to us from William Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence.” These words stay with me:

Man was made for Joy & Woe;
And when this we rightly know
Thro’ the World we safely go.
Joy & Woe are woven fine,
A Clothing for the Soul divine;
Under every grief & pine
Runs a joy with silken twine…
Every Tear from Every Eye
Becomes a Babe in Eternity…
The Bleat, the Bark, Bellow & Roar
Are Waves that Beat on Heaven’s Shore.

Poetry and personal essays are our bleats and barks, our bellows and a roar; they voice the truest, deepest experiences of our lives, ultimately helping us weave what we need, “clothing for the soul.”

Like sun that comes to us each day, may this New Year, 2007, bring you great healing and a profound sense of connection to what is most important, and may you allow yourself to write from those life events that stir you.

Yours,

Sheila