Poem needed for Honor and Celebrate Ceremony at upcoming Brain Tumor Walk

    The National Brain Tumor Society is looking for a new poem to read at the Honor and Celebrate ceremony, June 24, during the Brain Tumor walk at Crissy Field in San Francisco.  If you know a poem that is suitable for a memorial service, or that helped you in a time of wild grief, please post a link to it on this blog piece or on my Facebook timeline. The deadline is Sunday June 3, and you will receive a small prize if the Brain Tumor Walk executive committee selects a poem you nominate.

    Here's some background.

    For the past two years we have been using Epitaph by Merritt Malloy for the ceremony.  The bar is high:

Epitaph
   by Merritt Malloy

When I die
Give what’s left of me away
To children
And old men that wait to die.
And if you need to cry,
Cry for your brother
Walking the street beside you.
And when you need me,
Put your arms
Around anyone
And give them
What you need to give to me.

I want to leave you something,
Something better
Than words
Or sounds.

Look for me
In the people I’ve known
Or loved,
And if you cannot give me away,
At least let me live on your eyes
And not on your mind.

You can love me most
By letting
Hands touch hands,
By letting
Bodies touch bodies,
And by letting go
Of children
That need to be free.

Love doesn’t die,
People do.
So, when all that’s left of me
Is love,
Give me away.

    We are only looking for a different poem only because nobody wants to hear the same thing year after year. From the perspective of a rank amateur, here are what I see as its strong points for our purposes.

• It's short.

• The language is simple and accessible, and has a liturgical feel well-suited for the ceremony.

• The poem doesn't try to deny the pain of loss, it expresses it, allows it to resonate.  That is, it's light on the saccharine.

• On the other hand, the pain is not so raw and corrosive that it could only be expressed privately.  For example, these lines about a loss experience probably would not work, powerful as they are.

  …Bees in the heart, then scorpions, maggots, and then ash.
  He climbed onto the jumping girder of the bridge …
    — from Faint Music by former Poet Laureate Robert Hass

• It's not tied to a particular tradition.  There are many good Buddhist poems about death, but not everybody is a Buddhist.

• It's told in the voice of the departed, using loving memory as a path from grief. 

    None of the replacement poems I've read work quite so well.  For what it's worth, here are three of them, with strong and weak points noted. Take my opinions with a dollop of salt.

• After Words by Kimberly Blaser

    This one actually might work.  Great title, and these lines near the
start tell of an experience burned in many of our memories:

    … Because one night I was in a room
    listening until only one heart beat. …

    And it has a liturgical feel, beginning with sentences starting with "Because," and ending with sentences starting with "And if."  Moreover, the language is simple. But it's told from the viewpoint of the survivor, and grief is reconciled by accepting impermanence. Is everyone ready for that?  Imagine the opening and closing lines spoken aloud at the ceremony:

    Because the smallness of our being
    is our only greatness …

    …And if death is a foreign state
    we should loosen allegiance to this one.
    And if the soul leaves our body
    then we must rehearse goodbye.

• The Change by Denise Levertov

    We actually read this one at Jean's memorial service.  It's a beautiful poem by a revered poet.  In broad strokes, its theme is much like Epitaph's, transmuting grief by imagining the departed living on by expanding the worlds of the living.  But like After Words, it's told from the standpoint of the survivor, and includes one uncommon word, "arpeggio."  And the pain in the beginning might be too real, too raw:

    For years the dead
    were the terrible weight of their absence,
    the weight of what one had not put in their hands.
    Rarely a visitation — dream or vision —
    lifted that load for a moment, like someone
    standing behind one and briefly taking
    the heft of a frameless pack.
    But the straps remained, and the ache—
    though you can learn not to feel it,
    except when malicious memory
    pulls downward with sudden force …

    "malicious memory"? Know about that one — too many beans, not enough ice cream, as the if-I-could-live-life-over-again homily has it.  And probably most people do experience keen regrets.  But would we confess together at the ceremony?

• When Death Comes by Mary Oliver

    Another great poem by a revered poet.  And it does have a liturgical feel, with four repetition of the phrase "when death comes" near the beginning. However, it's more about living fully, and accepting mortality, than about working through grief. Or is that being too narrow?  Consider these lines:

    … And therefore I look upon everything
    as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
    and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
    and I consider eternity as another possibility,

    and I think of each life as a flower, as common
    as a field daisy, and as singular … 

    Could you read that as a way to accept loss by realizing that everyone is beautiful, everyone part of something larger than themselves?  Oliver ends that sentence with these stanzas:

    … and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
    tending, as all music does, toward silence,

    and each body a lion of courage, and something
    precious to the earth. …

    "A lion of courage." Think of brave Jean every time I read those words,
dwelling a  moment in her memory.