Online Journal
I remember one of the things that Grace Paley said about her work - that she wrote for the still small hope of justice.
This decade is going to be harder without her - without many of those who have been mainstays for a fully engaged life,
those who spoke out and wrote and acted to make a difference in the lives of so many. Grace Paley’s death
followed on the loss of our beloved great aunt, Mary Brown. Then, my partner, Alix, lost her father.
We explained to our son that his people are not gone out of his life. Their love for us,
their acts and stories, their hope of justice, their memories and how we use them, all those remain.
For months, I have traded notes with friends watching their mothers in what might be the last season of their lives.
I miss GrandMary painfully, but remember how often she told us how happy she was.
GrandMary prayed daily, Christian scientist prayers, unspoken but resonant. My Baptist childhood
could barely inhabit the same room with her Mary Baker Eddy books and papers.
But I understood absolutely when she closed her eyes and looked inside.
The dead are not dead while they can make us laugh at ourselves, provoke us to dream of them.
I dream of Grace Paley and Ellen Willis, Elsa Gidlow and Maxine Feldman.
I dream of Walter Kendrick and Bo Huston and Allen Barnett. I dream old friends and stories.
The best way I know to handle loss is to go back and read again all their poems and stories.
When I am gone, I will live on in story.
This is from the poem ‘Then’ by Muriel Rukeyser.
"When I am dead, even then
I will still love you, I will wait in these poems.
When I am dead, even then
I am still listening to you.
I will still be making poems for you
out of silence;
silence will be falling into that silence
it is building music."
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