By Lisa Starr
I will be forever grateful to Coleman Barks for many things, but there is no doubt that his greatest gift to me was introducing me to his friend, my hero, the poet Mary Oliver. As the first raw days since her death have stretched into two months, I am learning that it is nearly impossible to name my love for her, nor my awe for how she lived her life and what she accomplished with it. So since I can’t quite name the grief nor the wonder, nor my sadness for the honey locust tree, the grasshopper, the red fox and the sun in the morning, now that she is no longer here to celebrate their beauty—what I’ll do is tell you a little about the Mary Oliver who was my friend.
Mary was private, humble, fierce, intuitive, and hilarious. She made funny jokes and faces; she didn’t miss a beat; she kept a secret stash of cash in her desk in case anyone she knew got into some trouble and needed quiet help. On the envelope were the words “floating money.” Mary loved the everyday people—the ones who delivered letters to her mailbox and brought her clams they’d just dug up from the sand. And though she lived reclusively, she always found out who “her people” were, and found a way to help them. There are families whose rent she paid; a young girl who needed braces for her teeth, a friend, down on his luck, who needed a car and a place to stay. And while Mary’s generosity to others is its own legacy, what I want to emphasize here is her strength, for more than anything, Mary Oliver was courageous.
We now know, through some of the later poems, a few of the details about the abuse she endured as a child, and we also know that she used her craft to transform not only her own suffering, but also the heartbreaking nature of the world—the fact, say, that everything and everyone is going to die—into a thing of beauty. Think of “Night and The River;” think of the snapping turtle she found and captured in the city and released into a nearby pond because: Nothing’s important/except that the great and cruel mystery of the world,/of which this is a part,/ not be denied.
Mary was one of the greatest teachers about death and grief that we will ever know because she was one of their finest students. And though the courage to not look away is everywhere in the poems, I couldn’t possibly know the true depth of Mary Oliver’s courage until these last few years as she battled a series of cancers, each more aggressive than the last. There is no need to go into the list of diseases, treatments, hospitalizations, and indignities. I won’t talk about the hours in the chemo unit, the cheerless fish tanks, or the despair Mary felt about the “chemo brain” that was barring her access to language.
What I will tell you about is her resilience. Her faded blue jeans and Carhartt jacket and bright argyle socks. I will tell you how she’d wink at me from across the waiting room. How she’d tell me not to get too sad. Let’s not go there just yet, she said one day when she caught me crying on the drive home from the hospital. I want to tell you about how she handled the news of the feeding tube and I really want to tell you what she said the day she decided to refuse all further treatments and let the lymphoma run its course, but when I do, the words get replaced by tears, so I will tell you instead about the wild geese as they circle and land in the field just across the street from where I sit writing these very words, right now.
They’ve been doing it every day since I’ve been home. By home, I mean from Hobe Sound, Florida, where I had the honor of being with Mary for the last week of her life. A small team of friends shared the privilege of washing her hair, holding her, singing to her, and reading her own amazing poems to her. We played some rock and roll when we needed to. Lots of coffee. Lots of cookies. Lots of tears.
Please continue this article here: https://parabola.org/2019/04/28/the-courageous-mary-oliver-by-lisa-starr/?fbclid=IwAR0IkQCNS75Ti1oeaIx1pTemDnLKjEcGtmx2bS0uCz6TOCRM9hhZ7RHTbNU
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