original watercolor by William L. Bixby
On Memorial Day 62 years ago, my parents were married. This year, my father Bill, younger brother Peter and I have to celebrate their anniversary without her. She entered the hospice area of their assisted living community in Massachusetts on the evening of Good Friday, and passed on Easter.
I was driving east from Syracuse when I heard from dad that she had passed. The trees were just budding, lit from behind us by the late afternoon sun. I had a sense of her presence rising up in the sap of life freed from the body that wasn’t serving her anymore.
I see the sap of her life in myself.
My mother, Joanne W. Bixby (November 16, 1931 – April 1, 2018), was a poet. Creativity in general was a core aspect of the family she raised, of the man she married, and of her two sons. Her relationship to beauty, creativity, reading, writing, appreciating music, and learning from the life around her lives on in me.
I share three of her poems here, and my reflections on being and presence.
We Are What Sun and Wind and Rain Have Made Us (1997)
Rain has filled my oceans
So they crash on rocky shores
Reaching nearly to my feet,
Receding to gather its sunmade energy within me
As wind shudders through my being
To shake my foundations
Making my beliefs and actions
Consonant with earth’s truths.
Joanne Bixby once contained me; she was briefly the context of all my growing. Living in her, and then in her world – shared first with my dad and our family dog, and then also with my brother – I have for almost 60 years become, day-by-day, more aware of her life.
I remember the warmth and immense kindness in her touch and reassurances. Smiles that contained the awe and (now I see) anxiety of a young mother were the invisible background as I came home from school, full of excitement about newly learned things, the pains of social confusion, and an expanding world. The combination of a red tulip in our back yard and a song about a first spring flower glows in my memory.
Now, that memory also includes the space held by Mama (as I called her at the time).
Each of us brings a degree of coherence to the chaos of life, for ourselves and for those with us. I remember her as constantly providing this for our family. She insisted on family togetherness – mandatory family dinners and a picnic every weekend throughout the year.
There was pain in my emerging from her life into my own; fights with her over the boundaries of what I wanted to bring, do, be. I disappeared from her into my own world and container of young adulthood.
And then a period of seemingly parallel lives. She and I shared stories about what we were doing. She and my father went on dory trips – 12-foot rowboats that hold 6 people and gear for ocean travel – in Blue Hill Bay, Maine. They traveled in Newfoundland with their tent and later pop-up camper. Each had relatable memories for me that enlivened my hearing.
I am aware of being one of many containers of her continuing life. The growing things, the plants, the trees, the foxes. She wanted to be a marine biologist. I have that same fascination. The cool salty air at the edge of the seaweed. I remember in her last years when she could still walk but not travel, poking at little things with her cane. She had a keen sensitivity to aliveness.
The Silence of Nature (2004)
Wordless lambs
And coyotes and foxes
Cannot speak to us,
Masters of language.
Run along dumb beasts
Lest we become attuned to your patters
Begin to know your speech
To love you too much
And wish your home
Were not in the way of our commerce.
I felt her pride as I became a father, and shared my own stories of community organizing. Even then, in her listening, she continued to contain. I often felt like I could not convey the reality of my life in its fullness to her; I wanted so much to be understood for my own essence. Behind this desire I think is depth of gratitude – that who I am was my gift back to her for containing and birthing me.
At Christmas before and after her hip operation, and in the months leading up to our last conversation before she passed, the details became unimportant. Each time we were together, she powerfully and deeply let me know her love for me. It connected back to the beginning, and held everything in-between these 60 almost years, in the essence of coherence and wholeness.
Another Spring (2000)
Another spring
Of birdsong,
Budding shrubs and trees
Cold nights
Warm days
Shows the lie
Of dark nights
And grief.
In life
There may be death
But in death there is
Always Life.