See our Privacy Policy
Gratefulness
This is what life does. It hits you like a stone through the window in the form of a phone call from your son-in-law who says your daughter’s water has broken too early, and she’s in the hospital in antenatal care. It flips you back to forty years ago, when your first child was “born asleep,” as it read on a gravestone in Ireland. But life also gives you a car and a tank full of gas, so you can drive to the city to see her again and again for three long weeks. Your grandson turns this into a quest: Big Green Dinosaur. Stone Jesus. The Bridge. Gold Dome. Ben Franklin’s Kite. Lincoln on the Wall. White Greek Temple. The Swirl, aka, the parking garage. And life gives you dollars for the machine, which you gladly pay, hoping you don’t need to save coins for Charon, not yet, not now. Your daughter is miserable, and scared. But every day is money in the bank. The babies in the NICU are so small. Some of them don’t make it. Life shrugs. No skin off his teeth. It’s all a coin toss. Then one night, some switch is flipped, and whoosh, here comes Caitlin Isabella, out in nine minutes. It could have been a hundred years ago, when babies this small didn’t survive. But it isn’t, it’s now, and she’s claimed us with her dark-eyed stare. Sometimes you put your coins in the slot, and it’s cherries! cherries! cherries! Goodness has nothing to do with it. Look at this little one with her fleeting smile, the thinnest of commas. Which could have been an ellipsis, but isn’t . . . .
Posted by kind permission of the poet.
Two nights after he died, all night I heard the same one-line story on repeat:…
For times of grief and sorrow, we offer this curated collection of poems as a…
Somewhere someone needs help. Send love. It matters. If you can’t get there yourself, then…
This site is brought to you by A Network for Grateful Living, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. All donations are fully tax deductible in the U.S.A.
© 2000 - 2022, A Network for Grateful Living
Website by Briteweb