Difficult and blessed

Abstract

On an autumn day, alone in the house for about 30 minutes or so, without the babies and my husband to attend to, I sat in a small, sun‐filled room looking over a book of poetry that I had just bought, The Living and the Dead by Sharon Olds. She writes about the circumstances of living and dying. I love the book for a poem, “35/10,” about a mother witnessing the “replacement” of one generation by another—"an old story,” as she calls it. In the poem I see the young body of her daughter—a body in metamorphosis. I felt stirrings aroused inside me as I witnessed a tenderness between mother and daughter. I was reminded in a careful way of the eventual death and rebirth of everything.