This past weekend I heard a poem read aloud that moved me to tears. It describes one of the gifts we receive from grief. I read more of the author’s work (Naomi Shahib Nye) and will soon add some of her books for purchase. See what you think.

Kindness 

Before you know what kindness really is

you must lose things,

feel the future dissolve in a moment

like salt in a weakened broth.

What you held in your hand,

what you counted and carefully saved,

all this must go so you know

how desolate the landscape can be

between the regions of kindness.

How you ride and ride

thinking the bus will never stop,

the passengers eating maize and chicken

will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,

you must travel where the

Indian in a white poncho lies dead

by the side of the road.

You must see how this could be you,

how he too was someone who journeyed through the night

with plans and the simple breath

that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness

as the deepest thing inside,

you must know sorrow

as the other deepest thing.

You must wake up with sorrow.

You must speak to it till your voice

catches the thread of all sorrows

and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness

that makes sense anymore,

only kindness that ties your shoes

and sends you out into the day

to mail letters and purchase bread,

only kindness that raises its head

from the crowd of the world to say

it is I you have been looking for,

and then goes with you every where

like a shadow or a friend.

Naomi Shihab Nye

 This blog is a sister blog to our parent website, GoodBooksNW, where we have an online catalogue and we sell books on grief, divorce and blendedfamilies. By having this sister blog, we can review books and cover a lot more territory on grief.  My partner, Michael, died from a heart attack 4 years ago this week, and I have been profoundly changed by both his death and the experience of grief that accompanied his death. I have learned that grief is a rich teacher, and I started looking around at how little we prepare ourselves for an inevitable relationship with it. There are a number of good books I have read in the past few years to help me sort out and understand my new relationship with grief. Many of these are found in the catalogue and will be reviewed here.  We will explore grief in a very broad way on this blog. We will not only look at grieving around death, but will consider grief’s relationship with health, pets, aging, job loss, many different personal relationships, money, sense of home, and any other interesting areas people bring to his blog. Please stop by, let me know what you have learned about grief, and make suggestions about what you would like to see here.  Deborah Coryell, in her book Good Grief: Healing Through the Shadow of Loss  says “One of the wisdom teachings of grief is that we are all connected in our experience of loss. Just at the moment when we feel the pain of separation from the one we love or the place we love, we are connected to every single person who has or ever will experience a similar loss. …Birth, death, and grief are the only life events that every single one of us encounters.”