Poetry and Aging Parents Archives - Aging, caregiving and the journey through the second half of life

Season’s Song

December 24, 2019

(First Light) Season’s Song By David Solie Here or gone, the gravity Of holiday memories Brings us face to face With love’s blunt Truth: our “moment” With our parents Has passed, gone Forever along with Our childhood and It’s frantic…

Dancing with Dementia

September 19, 2019

Dementia recasts the memory landscape with people and events that never existed. We are both shocked and intrigued by what our aging parents are saying. Where did that come from we ask ourselves. And then there is the nagging question…

For Exhausted Caregivers…

January 24, 2019

This wonderful poem by John O’Donohue speaks to the world of caregivers who can quickly lose their mooring and are looking for language, strategies and rituals to help them recover from these unavoidable forays into in “empty time.” For One…

Inconvenient Eulogy

April 11, 2018

Inconvenient Eulogy by David Solie Even when things are going your way, Words don’t come easy on funeral day. Mourners turn up with guarded belief, Awaiting your words of pain and grief. But others arrive with their…

And Take My Waking Slow….

March 25, 2018

The Waking Theodore Roethke (1954) I Wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. I feel my fate in what I cannot fear. I learn by going where I have to go. We think by feeling. What is there…

The Ceremony of the Shoes

December 13, 2016

Embedded in the living towards the end lies a narrative about love under fatal duress. It is a space that refines courage and fosters an unexpected elegance. Frannie Lindsay’s poem below is about how this elegance, born of love and…

Wishes

October 27, 2015

Aging is like a zoom lens. The longer we hang around, the clearer we see what matters. We also see what was worth a second look or might be included in a second chance. Anne Porter’s poem “Five Wishes” is…

Once Young Parents

September 9, 2015

Worn photographs of once young parents are preludes to well known destinies, historical starting points that stir speculation about what might have been. This is the space that Deborah Cummins has captured in her striking poem “Another Life.” It reminds…

Memory’s Departure

September 3, 2015

Try as we might, memory is built like a cat, seeming tamed and committed only to turn and be inexplicability gone, maybe for good. Billy Collins’ brilliant poem “Forgetfulness” gives metaphoric voice to this unraveling that ties us in cerebral…

Poetry and Aging Parents, Part 6

July 5, 2015

We grant the old a special courage to weather the slings and arrows of aging, but we forget their older brains are rewired for contemplation, a benefit that goes far beyond facilitating life review. This unique capacity of second half…