The brief story of a friendship because of poetry
This story was originally published in Crow’s Feet on Medium.com
I remember when I wrote my last poem, not the last until the next one, but likely the last one ever. It turns out I’m not a poet, though Lynn thought I was. Lynn Kernan was a force who saw a poet in me and did what she could to tug it out of me.
It was the mid-90s and I was in my mid-50s, trying to rediscover myself after Wayne had died, already a couple of years before. Wayne was a force in his own right, but one less inclined to push my potential. That wasn’t out of malice, he just saw me as someone better suited to help him. A muse, maybe.
Lynn was different. She was already sure of her own worth as an artist and a poet. She was a fixture at the Bookend Poets group, which when I first encountered her, met in the cramped upstairs of our small public library. She already had a portfolio of poems and had been published in a number of places.
At the meeting, each actual or aspiring poet would read to the group whatever piece they had started, finished, or struggled over in the past month. The group, including Lynn of course, responded. Remarks varied, some critical, mostly supportive, but Lynn’s remarks were unreservedly, maybe uncritically, positive. She enthused — always. She looked at the effort as the goal of the poet. The end result was what it was and not as important as getting there.
At that first meeting, just there to listen, I felt understandably out of place. I had, as part of redefining myself after Wayne, begun reading established poets and gone to a reading or two in DC. I took to writing about my loss and beginning again. It looked like poetry, some rough, some smooth, all dark. I began wondering if writing poems should be a part of who I was.
I hadn’t verbalized anything at the Bookend meeting, other than the bare essentials about myself, absent any too-revealing details. I was still having trouble at that time outing myself to strangers. So I didn’t mention my dead partner or the need I was feeling to express myself as a gay widower. Still, Lynn must have detected something latent or interesting in my body language or the tone of my voice.
After the meeting, she pointedly came over and encouraged me to come back. I fessed up to having tried my hand at writing and then she insisted I come back. I did return the following month and read something, but I don’t remember what. But in putting context to whatever it was, I had to talk about Wayne and his passing. I likely got the sympathy vote, because this was a group of people receptive to whatever circumstance or emotion manifested itself in poetry. Poetry can be liberating in that way.
In any event, Lynn enthused and I believe honestly. Her insisting and my acquiescing began our friendship, which only stopped accumulating memories when she passed away some years later. She knew, of course, that I’d stopped writing poems, but by then our friendship made that irrelevant. Unconditional support when I was writing and unconditional support when I stopped.
I was the last of her friends to visit her before she died. Her son had moved her to a nursing home closer to him in Massachusetts, but five hundred miles away from home. She didn’t last long there.
But, unexpectedly, she called me one day and asked if I could come up for a visit. She was cheerful and just wanted to see someone. I flew up the next day and spent an afternoon with her. She was still very much herself, keeping active, she said, by interviewing some of the other residents and writing about them. She told me a few abridged versions of what she’d found out about several of them, even one or two who were deep into their dementia. Every one of them she found fascinating. She was still enthused.
She did her fake complaining about the aides and nursing staff trying to get her to quit smoking — something she just laughed at the prospect of. It bothered her though that they kept her cigarettes behind the nursing station and she had to wheel over to get them, one at a time, and then wheel herself outside to smoke. It was likely her main physical exercise though.
She made it through five or six cigarettes during the afternoon and we talked the whole time. She had no misgivings or regrets about having to leave her home and friends and wasn’t at all nostalgic. We didn’t share many friends and she didn’t ask about anybody. She had always been more invested in the present and what she could accomplish in the immediate future with her writing.
She knew she wouldn’t be alive much longer. Her cancer treatments hadn’t been successful and she was going through a recurrence that had disfigured her face. She was mildly annoyed that the bandage the staff had given her to conceal the deep wound in her cheek kept falling down. She’d just pull it back up into place and chuckle at the need to do it. It evidently scared some of the other residents.
In between one of our treks to the outdoor smoking area, we went back to her room and she asked if I’d like a Tarot reading. She was an accomplished interpreter and we’d had dozens of readings over the years. I don’t remember any single one of them being dire or revealing some nastiness down the line. It wasn’t in her nature to find flaws in someone’s future. This time was no exception. I was going to be fine and she was right.
So when I finally left to catch my flight back home, we hugged as we always did on parting and she thanked me for coming. She was as bright on leaving as she had been on arrival. And she didn’t once ask me to be a poet again. That still wasn’t in the cards.