A Friend’s Mother

On a Thursday a friend called to cancel our plans for Saturday. She was responsible for planning her mother’s memorial service on Sunday, and was overwhelmed. Could I help her pick out poetry for the program?

All that came to mind was Wilfred Owen, hardly appropriate for the occasion. So I asked her to tell me about her mother. Due to COVID she had been unable to perform the customary rituals of mourning, now family could gather and mark a life well spent.

Her mother had suffered the loss of her sixteen year old brother to suicide when she was thirty. This traumatic experience had led her to form an organisation to support family of suicide victims, and to write a book. All of this together with being a loving and supportive mother to her two daughters.

Asking a mourner to share their memories is of course a conventional way of comforting them, but without telling my friend I had it in mind to construct a haiku for her. Here it is.

A blaze of action//
Dealing with her loss severe//
Always for others

She included it in the program and closed the service with it. Poetry to a purpose.