I promised myself I wouldn’t do this. But I cannot let the anniversary of last days of Peggy’s life go unnoted. I celebrated her birthday on May 2nd and now I find myself commemorating the way she lived her dying four years ago. She lived 100 years plus 100 days.
Over our forty years together, Peggy and I created a soil in which our love watered and sunned
a garden. I find myself imbued with that love as I embrace my remaining years. When she died, grief
felt to me like self-pity. Instead, I celebrate the gift she bequeathed. When
I go, she said of my future, go for it. I have.
While under hospice care she continued to write poetry until
a week before the end on August t5, 2021. She faced the east window and communed with a hummingbird while singing along with the Irish folk group, Celtic Thunder. Below are excerpts of poems she wrote
leading up to her death. All are taken from her chap book, Two Is A Sacred
Number.*
I’ve taken some liberties with the lines I chose. I have
conflated the overwhelming love she radiated with her embrace of the ultimate
unknown. Both love and dying, I believe, are aspects of letting go, a mysterious transport.
A love that springs from nothingness, with opulence
expanding,
To welcome each day in the flourish of this enormity,
our constant wedding.
Love has its own arithmetic,
Knows only how to increase.
From this window, larger than these years
you bring me vessels for the insistence of green.
Through your eyes I see rivers to remind us
what keeps moving, fluid as bodies.
You have traveled me here, out of a thirsty night
through advancing dark, into a moist
and sudden incandescence.
Love flares from its invisible yes.
Flesh answers more than desire
I/you forget to be old.
A Mozart rondo filling me with now.
Through the crack in the bedroom wall,
Green mystery makes its way.
When you enter among monarch butterflies
what I see comes to this:
The tree-lit park, touch of silk
The taste of tangerines.
Where we have traveled has carried me home.
I find my way to the orange sunrise
Even at the ebb of my long life.
* Peggy wrote under her maiden name, Peggy Aylsworth. Her poetry books are available from Amazon.
