Featured Poet - Lynda Scott Araya

HOW TO TREAT A BEREAVED MOTHER - A POSSIBLE GUIDE

Allow her the space to reshape herself

for whom is she now with a child gone?

and the umbilical cord that stretched between them

always, through childhood, the university years,

is now snapped like a rope spiralling downwards

leaving her raw.

Be kind and allow time

as much as she needs, which might be forever,

her whole being is broken, not an arm or a leg

and do not heap upon her others’ miseries

like ostentatious funeral bouquets:

a still-birth, a car crash, the death of a father

for deaths have no hierarchy

and it’s not a competition.

None is more awful than another.

Do not ask how the child died for

it’s the WHY not the HOW that matters

when she howls in the bathroom

foetus-curled on the floor

before drying her eyes,

putting on her game face,

going to work

facing those still living

although she is dead inside.

Avoid the labels: hysterical, emotional, negative, mad

for she is all those things yet none of them

and sudden mood swings, wild anger

are valid steps on the journey that she did not ask for.

Walk silently on eggshells but do not mention them,

and keep to yourself thoughts of what used to be.

Sit with her despite it all.

Do not claim to understand

for this is her story and this is her grief.

ABOUT THE POEM: "I wrote this poem just a few years into my journey because I wanted people to know that, despite their fear at confronting raw grief, suicide and mental health, those struggling with those issues needed friends who had the courage to walk alongside them without judgment or imposing their own stories. I did not need them to ‘fix’ me but to bear witness. Importantly, I also wanted to call out all of those who treated me with callousness."

WALKING ON EGGSHELLS

Some men say that they walk on eggshells around me,

that I am addled, scrambled, half-baked, to be derided, dismissed.

that they need to make ALLOWANCES for me.

Daily.

When my son died, my world cracked; my emotions run raw

and they have called me a miserable wretch,

confused, confrontational, forgetful, hysterical,

inappropriate, irrational, lazy, messy, negative, overwhelmed, sick, unstable, useless.

A BITCH

But they do not know my strength.

I gather my pieces around me, sit with grief,

chip slowly away at sorrow. Fragmented, yet,

despite those men,

to spite those men,

not broken.

ABOUT THE POEM: "All the words in italics are actual words used against me and about me, all by the one person who should care about me the most. Many people are cruel about sudden death and to those most affected."

READING THE ROOM

He phoned me at work, muttered rushed perfunctory

clichés, hollow condolences then the hard questions:

how did he do it, were there any signs, mental illness?

He needed to know he said, worried about his own son,

would he take his life? Asked me as though I knew the answers

but he was a librarian and could do his own research.

ABOUT THE POEM: "I was teaching a class of sixteen year old boys when an acquaintance who was then chief librarian at the town’s library phoned to quiz me about clues that my son was going to take his own life. His questions were intrusive, insensitive, invasive, unwanted. He was all about himself."



WILDERNESS

(After The Persistence of Memory 1931 by Salvador Dali)

For me, time hangs stretched between hard realities,

it slithers from the past to the dead 

uncertainty of now, after you, desiccated 

by the dark of your barren, precipitous world, took one last step. 

Skyward.

ABOUT THE POEM: "As a mother bereaved by suicide, this is always on my mind and I cannot visit the town where it happened or look at a rope without being there in that empty garage, music blaring, rain pouring with him, although, of course, I wasn’t."

MENTAL MEANCE

Mental Menace

loomed large in his childhood,

a man in a mirror,

a mental freak, with spikes ticking all over him,

ugly scars, muscles the size of barrels,

bright yellow eyes which saw too much, searched always

for injustice but most of all love.

Without warning, he would erupt; someone beside him, inside him,

would upset the balance, hurl furniture, tear a door from its hinges,

a voice in his head saying, “you have too much power.”

Once, at school, he fought a boy who provoked him,

although he was as much to blame, perhaps more,

a monster of mass proportions at the bus bay,

holding down his victim.

Sudden plasma balls appeared in his hands, the world went fuzzy,

disappeared as he leapt on the boy, pounded him, heard dimly

the whack and the smash of boy against concrete, felt the boy’s blood sticky on his hands, and knew that he could not dilute this mess up,

even if he wanted to, and trapped in the might

of Mental Menace, he stood there howling like a wild animal.

ABOUT THE POEM: "When my son Adam was about eight years old, he wrote constantly at school and at home about a character, Mental Menace. I have a book he wrote with illustrations of this character. Following his death, I realised the likelihood that Mental Menace was him, or at least an aspect of him, and that he was illustrating his own mental illness. It was there, all along, hiding in plain sight."

EXPECT THE UNEXPECTED

and not what you, deep in grief,

would know now to give: space to grieve, a friendly ear

a shoulder to cry on, an offer to walk the dog,

feed the cat, make the bed, to pick up the bra

that you have not worn for days, even weeks, from the floor

without fuss or fanfare.

Expect gossip about

parents and whether you were a good one,

loud conversations in the staffroom about death,

those final moments, judgement about your state of mind

callous comments — I’m so tired, I could kill myself,

He was stupid to kill himself

How come you did not see that coming and

Well, if you give a man enough rope ...

Learn your new labels but kick them aside:

mad, messy, confused for you are much better

than those who sneer and call you crazy and

send inane videos of cartoon giraffes

that message outdated theories of grief to ‘cheer you up,’

to make you worse, and who tell you your experience is not

valid, that you should smile more, that it’s time to move on

although it’s never time for that especially if you must

fight hurtful cliques, online gossip, a malicious website

that leaves you reeling: a picture of a noose tightly knotted,

and you know who has viewed it and tell the police.

Do not expect meals delivered, parents to ring to offer

support, a friend to vacuum your house, a cousin to

tell you that you are doing your best even if it is only

brushing your hair, wearing your knickers when you go

to the shop. Know that there will be many who toss you aside:

a friend of fifteen years who shuts you off, a colleague

who, foot poised on a bottom step, turns, high tails it

back up the stairs, too scared of grief to wish it good morning.

Do not expect consideration, kindness, a hot meal delivered,

because people will say it’s your fault it all happened,

that you are bringing down morale, thoughtless,

unable to string together a sentence, stupid and fat

and that you need to do better with biscuits in tins, snacks

in cupboards, washing folded and never left piled.

Expect to be grief-jacked on the streets, in the workplace by

others telling their unasked-for stories of suicide, a dead baby

though it had moved the previous day,

and learn to remind them that this is your story, your grief,

and that you are not weak. Expect to cry in public toilets.

You will find a locked bathroom a good place to cry,

crouched, stifling cries, forehead against a cold wall.

Make it clear, if you can, that you

need help, even if it is only an invite for coffee,

a chance to perhaps say

your child’s name to someone again.

ABOUT THE POEM: "This is response to words said to me both in my personal life and in my workplace. They were said deliberately and calculated to hurt. The poem shows the loneliness of a mother bereaved; the cacophony of insults around her which is in stark contrast to the silence about her child as though that person no longer matters. No longer was or is."