Chapter 18

The Tough Subjects

What I am asking you to do in this book is to shed your inhibitions, to shut out the voice of the crow, who keeps telling you that you can’t write about that subject, whatever it is, because it’s too frightening or too sad or too shameful. I felt it was important for me to show you an example of a poem that for me was one of the most difficult I’ve ever written. For anyone who has been long married or partnered, there are a lot of taboo subjects. These are taboos we place on ourselves, because we want to think of ourselves as kind and supportive and loving, no matter how many times we know we fall short of that ideal. We want to believe the best of ourselves, but deep down we also know that we often can’t meet our eyes in the mirror, the person that mirror reveals us to be.

When I wrote this poem, published in What We Pass On, I was thinking about shame. I had no idea where it was going; it had its own direction and my pen simply followed. While it started as a childhood memory of my embarrassment in front of my grown- up male cousin, before I knew it, I was heading toward an entirely different source of shame.

Shame

Today I was thinking about shame and how much

it is a part of everything we do, the way

I was ashamed at 10 to say to my cousin

that my mother asked me to buy toilet paper,

as though my grown-up male cousin didn’t use

toilet paper and wasn’t stuck with all those messy bodily

functions we have to plan our lives around, the way public

bathrooms and our need for them remind us of our humanity,

a cosmic joke on us, so we won’t forget how rooted we are

to the earth and not the ethereal beings the nuns wanted us

to be. Today I was thinking about shame and I see Dennis,

thin and frail and naked, the skin stretched tight over

his big bones, not an ounce of fat to cover him, the skin blue

and translucent as he crawls from the bedroom on his

helpless legs to the bathroom. How ashamed he is,

as though this illness were a failure of his own manhood

and he to blame, how he pounds his fists on the floor in

frustration, how he scuttles into the bathroom and closes

the door but not before I see the dark well of sorrow in his eyes.

Today when I am thinking about shame, and wish

it were only toilet paper or a red splotch on my dress

or my inability to learn the Periodic Table in Chemistry

that made me feel it, instead of my convoluted feelings

about my husband’s illness, how nothing in our lives

is all one thing or another, not love, not grief, not anger,

but always mixed with its opposite emotion. I see Dennis

crawling along the floor, and I am struck with the axe of grief,

a terrible pity that can do no good, but mixed in with it,

the shame of my own impatience when he can’t

remember something I told him two minutes ago

or when he struggles for twenty minutes to open a package

and won’t accept help, or when he insists he can walk

down the stairs and falls, the corrosive shame of my quick

annoyance, the shame of my lack of patience,

the shame of feeling that his illness is a deep

and muddy river in which we both will drown.

Obviously, I didn’t really want to present this negative picture of myself in my poem. As I was writing this poem, I found myself crying, but I forced myself to keep on writing it. I knew it was something I needed to say and that, many times, when I reach the cave in my own center, I do end up crying. This poem also was one I had great difficulty reading in public; in fact, the first time I read it to an audience I cried. I’ve learned now that, if I’m going to read a poem to an audience for the first time, and it’s a poem that made me cry as I wrote it, I should read it to groups of friends first before trying to read it to an audience.

Sometimes when I’m leading a workshop, I will look up from my own writing (I always write when my students write), and I see that one of my students is crying. The joke in my workshops is that you should always bring a box of tissues with you to class. Going to the cave can be very tough, but it is those poems that cause others to react in a deep, emotional way. Sometimes students begin to cry as they read their poems. I always try to get them to finish reading, even if they are crying, because the next time they read the poems aloud, it will be easier. I guess, it also says something to me about courage—if you can force yourself to get through reading a poem that is from a place so deep inside you that you cry.

Before my book, All That Lies Between Us, was published, a friend came to me and told me that the poems about my husband’s Early Onset Parkinson’s Disease were very moving, but that I shouldn’t publish them because it would be a betrayal of him. I worried about it, and then I showed the poems to Dennis and asked how he felt about them and about my publishing them. He said: “You wrote them because you needed to write them, and they might help someone else in our situation so you need to publish them.”

Anytime you’re writing a poem that deals with long-term illness or disability, you may worry about hurting someone’s feelings. However, I think you shouldn’t censor what you write. Once it is down on paper, you can decide not to publish the poem in a book or a magazine or you can put the poem away for later publication. You should not try to control what you write and when. I always have the feeling that if you do, you end up killing off the creative spirit in yourself.