Here we are, November…. would trade you in for an April any day. Oh, month of remembrance, you are coloured with such sorrow. This year has merely passed, one plodding day after another, all blurred together in one numb muddle… but with all the fragments of clarity I can muster, Bernadette, I thank you for keeping me going and for making me shower. Hannah, thank you for remembering Gampy so solidly, and so sweetly, that I don’t have to worry any more. Missy and Mike, thank you for making me secure and so at home in your lives. Debbie, thank you for being there every time I need help to do something hard.  John, thank you for taking care of me, especially in the really blonde moments. Michelle, Stephanie, Kevin, and all the others at NSCC, thank you for keeping Robert alive with the scholarship fundraising… you are his angels now.

No matter how much I hate it, the 26^th grows closer, and I know I won’t be a writer that day… incredibly, I’ve been working on a poem for the Herald… it’s been a good exercise for me to re-write it every morning for the past six weeks.  There was a time, not long ago, when I would have read this section of the paper, puzzled, and asked Robert “do people think the Herald is delivered in heaven?” Now that we’ve both been utterly humbled, and then some, I offer this up in any venue that will accept it… to the universe, then, I suppose.

searching for you endlessly
unconvinced that you could die
glimpse of you in a baby’s eyes
a shudder as you breeze by

questions have no answers
plans are gone askew
but your light,
your heart,
your generosity,
i carry these parts of you

as if i have a phantom limb
astonished you’re not here
never will stop loving you
no…
not ever.

Eileen