Dandy Note #4

Over the weekend Blacksburg Books was generous to host typewriter poetry again. My first “customer” was a woman who wanted a eulogy for her cat. The word eulogy was not said - neither was obituary, tribute, or in memorium - but she wanted something to put on her bedside table alongside her cat’s six-month old ashes. 

Dead pet poems are common requests. I love to write them - to ask and listen and write in commemoration of a beautiful orange tabby with dragon green eyes that liked to share slices of American cheese for dinner. Dead since November, her owner hasn’t worn mascara since.

I love writing poems about the dead because they bring mine back too. With the typewriter between us - myself and a stranger - grief is allowed. Though we mourn different loves, we are living along the same dotted line where grief signed our initials and dared us to go on. 

As the self-professed cat lady and grade school teacher showed me videos of her nineteen and a half year old cat, I took notes, trying to fit remnants of memories on a 6x6 piece of cardstock: how Liona loved to stare out the window and chirp at the birds and do the roll and stretch; how there were boyfriends, sure, but really for the last twenty years it had been the two of them, this woman and her cat, and the photos she showed progressed over both of their lifespans - a college girl holding a kitten, a woman carrying a ball of orange fur in a monogrammed blanket.

It’s not uncommon for folks to tear up talking about the subject of their poem - grandparents, exes, etc. but every time I am moved by how vulnerable a person is willing to be. I am honored to be trusted to record what people have cherished the most and lost. 

Thank you to the friends who have come out to Blacksburg Books these last few months for Valentines and eulogies and tributes and a lot of genre-less momentos in between. Thank you for listening as I’ve read them back to you. 

According to my algorithm the difference between an obituary and a eulogy is a “notice of a death” versus “praise for someone who has just died.” One sounds more human than the other, but neither is correct. Grief is a genre of its own and on its own. Poetry is sacred because it asks what is most painful about the thing that hurts, and in return for making what is private public, it soothes, or wants to, and sometimes that is consolation enough.