Dear Granny,
I suppose the dust has
settled now on your grave.
I know how you liked to be
up to snuff news-wise,
so here you go.
I saw your son this week.
He told me someone
planted a wooden cross
beside your headstone with
NORA LOU
burned across the grain. Yes,
no doubt your kind-eyed neighbor.
Your son misses you terribly,
so wishes he could talk to you.
He looks pretty good though.
He’s gonna be okay.
I’ll try and call him every Sunday
night just like he did you
in the hope that if he can’t hear
his mother’s dulcet voice
his wayward son’s will do.
I’d love to talk to you
as well, ask you a man’s questions
which lead to answers I had
no time for as a boy.
I suppose those conversations
will have to wait though until the dust
settles on the rest of us and
we latecomers find similar cease
from our labors beneath
that sheltering sky of skies.
Maybe those questions won’t
matter then. I don’t know, as from
here its hard to say.
a perspective shifter on a morning in dire need of a shifted perspective
I have conversations that are waiting too. hope they are sweeter and richer and more grace-filled on the other side
missing my mom and dad right now… gripped.
After my mother passed away, my father went almost daily to her grave, pull up a lawn chair, light his pipe, and sit and tell her the goings-on of the family. At first I found this strange, but now with both gone, I understand the comfort it brings.
I talk to my dead. Not all the time, and never at graveside, but I talk to them, and they answer more often than most would believe.
I talk to my dad quite often. And my brother. A little to my son-in-law and still to my best friend, who died 17 years ago. I love this gentle speech of yours and wonder what you may hear back at some point. We are watching my MIL slowly fade away now, been going on quite a while. Somehow, I think we’ll find that when she moves on, we’ll be able to talk to her more completely than we can now. Maybe we’ll be able to capture the person who used to be when that time comes. Blessings to you and your dad as you grieve.
“I’d love to talk to you
as well, ask you a man’s questions
which lead to answers I had
no time for as a boy.”
Yes. I feel this way.
Beautifully written. I think about conversations I’d like to have with my Granny or my father–questions I’d like to ask. I too wonder if those questions won’t matter then.