“A Hundred Falling Veils”

From "A Hundred Falling Veils," used with permission from the author Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

This month's issue of "Connections for Wellbeing" invites you to reflect on the poetry of "wordwoman" Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer - a mother who writes of losing her son to suicide. INMI is so very grateful to Rosemerry for bringing the gift of her poetry into our hearts, and to our first edition of "Connections" that is poetry.

Visiting the Place Where My Son Died
Please, I tell myself,
don’t take this lightly.
Don’t walk into this room
as if it’s just another room.
Come with reverence.
Please, I say to myself—
all of my selves—
please don’t stride
across this wooden floor
as if it isn’t the last place
your son brought the world
into his lungs,
the last place he loved
and ached and wept.
So I sit and breathe
until I feel it rise in my chest
how sacred it is, this place.
I sit here until I feel
my attention split.
I notice the urge to leave.
I choose again to stay,
and the choice baptizes me.
Please, I say to myself,
please slow to the pace of stone.
Nothing to do but be here.
And the crying comes.
And goes. And comes again.
And goes. I close my eyes and
let the shadows grow.
Then open my eyes and look
beyond the window to the sky,
the cliffs, the lake.
Please, I tell myself,
do not refuse to see it is beautiful.
What is the part of me that dies?
And what is the part that rises,
slow and new, to walk again
into the world?

Going Deeper into the Mystery
I don’t know why I did not see
my son’s choice to take his life as a failure.
Not as his failure. Not as mine.
Not the failure of the world.
Not the failure of his friends.
It’s not as if I’m a stranger to failure—
I who can endlessly beat myself up
just for failing to remember to return a call.
I don’t know why I did not need to blame.
Don’t know why I didn’t rail at God.
Why I didn’t contract
into a crumpled ball of shame.
I don’t know what grace stepped in
and turned my heart again and again
toward compassion, toward humanness.
Don’t know why it only occurred to me
to love him. To be gentle with myself.
I don’t know why the world
met my broken heart with such generosity,
obliterating any walls of failure
before I could even fashion the bricks.
I don’t know how it works,
this mystery of acceptance,
but it saved me,
never trying to rewrite the story,
asking nothing of me except
that I let myself be led through every moment
by what I cannot know.

The Welcoming
Sometimes when I miss you I find myself outside
standing in the meadow, surrounded by tall field grass,
red canyon walls and vaulted high blue sky,
and it’s not that my sorrow is any smaller, it’s just
that I’m reminded how small is my life and how vast
is the world. Somehow being outside makes it easier
to remember I’m part of a story so much larger
than my own. Even the tiniest new leaf
on the cottonwood tree, even the smallest wave on the river
sings to me of immensity, calls me into the great
communion, invites me to re-see the moment
as an altar where I can lay down even my greatest
wounds and feel how the world receives it all
and says, welcome, it’s all welcome, welcome.