This hollow ache persists
with every desperate breath,
every tear-stained cheek,
every filthy promise,
every shattered dream,
every shady severance.
As sorry, shallow sands
erode under our bare feet
and wash away at sea
with this tidal wave
of falsities and regrets,
we must link arms,
preserve those struggling
to tread treacherous waters,
and resolve together
to fight these shark attacks,
to keep on swimming.
Since you’ve been gone, you
wouldn’t believe how the world
and our lives have changed.
You never knew that I married
a man I love, or that we live
in the desert where I can swim
outside in the winter, or that
I survived a heart attack on
my sixtieth birthday, in the
city where both of us
were born, or that
the grandsons you loved as
children are thriving, though
they have nearly reached
middle age, or that some people
now ride in cars with no
actual drivers, or that it’s kind
of a metaphor for our
country, which has lost
its moral compass, or that
the flag you defended and
saluted is no longer yours, or
that I am thankful to write and
sing in my late sixties, because
I was meant to do those all
along. All of this is true, and
it prompts me to worry and
hope–mostly worry–that
even though I am thankful
for good health, my kind and
compassionate husband, my
own boundless empathy, and
the relationships I’ve nurtured
with my sons, and many diverse
friends, I feel heavy uncertainty
in our country, and anticipate
more losses ahead only
to protect myself, and
of course, it reminds me of
other losses I’ve endured,
especially on the anniversary
of your passing the day after
a big Thanksgiving meal
with your sisters. By now,
you can see that the world
you knew is most definitely
gone, but you live in
my memories, and
I still love you, I grieve for you,
I grieve for me, I grieve for us.
Most of all, I still remember the
many monumental moments
–the good and bad–we shared
so long ago, Dad.
As we count our losses,
we brace for shadows
and ripples lurking
in the darkness.
The comfort of an
undeterred desert moon
shines stillness.
It conjures hope
and the ebb and flow
of constancy living
on their own cycles.
It rises with flickers
of unfulfilled promises
and etched memories
of loved ones gone
but never far away.
When I saw you
from across the room
high-five your conspirators,
the simmer of my sadness
escalated into a boiling frenzy.
What audacity … to celebrate
at the funeral of my beloved,
to dance on graves and marble stones
that ripple and repeat on rolling hills.
While I grieve for her and them,
I grieve more for all of us
and what will come next.
Yes, I am down … gutted really.
But I am still out and
I am determined to rise up.
I still have my past and present,
even if I don’t know my future.
I still have my passion.
I still have my chosen family.
I still have my truth.
I still have my identity.
I still have my voice.
In January 2014, the fog of grief occupied my brain and body. My mother had been gone one year, but I hadn’t yet found a constructive way to heal and process my grief.
Along the way, my husband Tom and therapist Valerie encouraged me to embark on a new path that would help me recapture my creative spirit.
I decided to leave my communication consulting career. Soon after, I began to write personal stories that mattered to me. Vivid recollections inspired and spawned by grief. Observations about love and loss in my family that helped me chart a new course and publish my first book, From Fertile Ground.
With time and reflection, I wrote four more books about the tender and whimsical ups and downs of childhood, the poignancy of leaving one home and surviving to find another, the adventures of creating a new life in the Arizona desert, and the poetry that has stirred inside me for thirty years and finally escaped to land on a page.
In small and large ways, my mother is in every one of those books and numerous essays. Yet she didn’t live long enough to read any of it, except one poem I gave her on Christmas Eve 2009.
I know now that writing about her in new and different ways has kept her wisdom and generosity alive and accessible for me.
July 26, 2024, would have been Helen F. Johnson’s 101st birthday. I knew I wanted to write about that, but until my fingers hit the keyboard, I wasn’t sure what I would say … because I thought I’d said it all before.
Maybe I haven’t.
How I loved and admired–and still remember–her tenacity. Her legacy of letters. Her devotion to family, friends, and the power of nature.
She would have loved the artistic life Tom and I have created in Arizona among the buttes and cacti. Writing stories, screening movies, singing songs, feeding stray cats.
Making new friends, while remembering old ones. Doing our best to guide and encourage my sons–her beloved grandsons–as they make their way toward the middle of their lives.
Cherishing each moment of our retirement years, without ever knowing where it will lead. Never wanting to know how or when it will end.
On July 26, 2012, we celebrated my mother’s eighty-ninth birthday together. It was her last.
Twelve years have passed. I’m much older, more appreciative and impatient. But also, wiser. Healthier. Gayer. Grayer. More contented with my own life and legacy. More worried about the world’s plight.
Grief is no longer my catalyst, my nemesis, my companion. Of course, I see it in the rearview mirror. But, with the passage of time, I discovered higher ground without the ghost of grief.
I no longer think of my mother every day. But when I do, I am grateful for the moments she and I shared–the gifts of memories and photographs I treasure–and the propensity to write about it.
All of this runs through our DNA.
I last visited my father’s grave at Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery in September 2021.
If there is such a thing as beauty to behold in a final resting place for those who served, it exists there just south of St. Louis on the banks of the Mississippi River–fourteen hundred miles east of where I live and write today.
On this Memorial Day, I remember Dad–and the thousands of fallen soldiers gathered around him–with twelve lines I wrote on August 27, 1996 … almost three years after he died.
This poem and forty-one others appear in my book A Path I Might Have Missed.
***
The Soldier on the Hill
I talked with the soldier on the hill today.
We sat, we cried, we laughed, we prayed.
The bells rang true, the trees stood free.
A breeze swept past to welcome me.
Shadows filled the landscape then.
Tempers rose without his pen.
Snowflakes fell, the grass turned green.
All without a change of scene.
Now the soldier rests with them,
Hand-in-hand–all blessed again.
They greet another trailing soul.
Who makes the journey past the knoll.
In late March of 2015, we visited the Painted Desert in northeast Arizona.
Tom and I weren’t yet full-time residents of the Grand Canyon State. We were Illinoisans, traveling on I-40, passing through the desolation and grandeur of the American southwest.
Fortunately, when we saw the sign for the Painted Desert, we had the gumption to exit the highway and soak up the scenery.
I don’t know what I was thinking at the moment Tom snapped this photo. But I imagine the experience of gazing out over the majestic landscape of this geological gem inspired me to keep writing, keep exploring.
I was nearing the midpoint of constructing my first book, From Fertile Ground, trying to maintain my creative momentum and find an ending to my grief-induced story of three writers talking to each other across the generations.
A September 2015 trip to North Carolina would provide the inspiration I needed to cross the finish line.
In 2016–on another momentous late March day–my book went live. I remember the giddy feeling of amazement … holding it in my hands when it arrived in our mail in Arizona.
Somehow, buried in the fog of my mother’s passing, I had unearthed my story, discovered an avenue for my artistic passions, and found my voice.
Since that time, the first half of each year–with March as the centerpiece–has become a catalyst for my creativity. I have published all five of my books (and launched my website) spread across the months of January through May.
This year, March has presented me with a new opportunity, a new wrinkle … and a new voice. Let me explain.
Up until recently, my books have been available in paperback and Kindle formats, but not as audiobooks.
A few friends and family members have encouraged me to pursue this additional option, but the cost and the time required to “give voice” to even one of my books felt prohibitive.
However, recently I learned of a viable option through Amazon, whereby I could select a computer-generated “virtual voice” to tell one of my stories.
I was skeptical at first. The concept felt mechanical and scary. How could a computer-generated voice capture the emotion, description, and intent of my words?
But after doing some research and listening to various options, I found a voice that resonated with me.
It captures the essence of An Unobstructed View, the personal (but strangely universal) story of Tom’s and my circuitous journey–physical and metaphorical–to carve out a new life in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona.
Thanks to computer technology, readers (or I shall I say listeners?) can now feel the sense of possibilities and uncertainties we experienced in 2017–remembering the seminal moments of our past Illinois life while forging ahead (on the other side of trauma) to create a home in Scottsdale.
I hope you’ll listen. Allow yourself to be transported through the theater of the mind. It’s a unique experience–possibly more powerful, like tuning in to someone else’s serendipitous story–to hear the words I composed spoken by a “virtual voice.”
https://www.amazon.com/Unobstructed-View-Personal-Journey-Illinois/dp/B0CY941CS5?ref_=ast_author_dp
At any rate, I know many people prefer to consume their books that way through their devices, through their ear buds, as they navigate the trail of life.
Now, one of mine is out there for you–and all the world–to hear.
In the base of nature’s jagged bowl, weighty wings of clouds gather and descend. Endless cascades of cleansing tears appear to wash tangled unsuspecting souls.
“Fly away” they shout. “Show us those we knew are lasting. Bathe us in revealing light and budding promise. Help us replenish and remember what has gone.”
***
This poem is dedicated to all those who have gone before us. To enjoy more of my poetry, buy my latest book–A Path I Might Have Missed–on Amazon.
After my mother died on this day in 2013 at age eighty-nine, my grief took root.
With a little time, a lot of reflecting and journaling, and the support of a small circle of family and friends, I found and nurtured my own path from the branches of despair.
By 2015, I had carved out a storyteller’s life Helen Johnson would have loved. Late that year, I flew to North Carolina to visit Frances, her only sister.
Spending time with Frances in the state where both were born–and revisiting childhood memories of my grandparents’ farm in Huntersville, NC–propelled my creativity.
In March of 2016, I completed and published my first book, From Fertile Ground. It is the story of my journey and grief.
If you’ve read this story about three writers (my grandfather, mother, and me) and their love of family, you know this isn’t really the cover.
Today I’ve superimposed this photo of Helen and Frances together (in my sister’s backyard in 2003 or 2004 in northern Illinois) to remember them both.
Why? Because Frances was the last physical vestige of that rural, 1960s world for me. When she died six months ago at age ninety-one, I metaphorically waved goodbye to those years of running amok barefoot on warm summer days in the Tar Heel State.
Of course, I will always have rich memories of my wise-and-frugal mother, who wrote countless letters, and my fun-loving aunt, who traveled the world in her retirement years. In their own ways, they inspired me to tell my story.
Today–as I remember them both–I can walk into the sunroom of the Scottsdale, Arizona condo where Tom and I now live. I can pull my book off the shelf and find this passage.
“What I knew before was that the farm was a place of discovery for me and the fertile ground there was a physical and psychological refuge from the hardships of our family drama in St. Louis. What I know now is that I would need to go back to North Carolina to come to terms with my grief and integrate my southern memories with my present-day, real-life adult existence.”
I can take solace in the fact that I’ve written about Helen and Frances–who they were, who they loved.
Though they are both gone, they live on the pages.
We all endure specific days–or months–that test our best intentions and weigh on our psyches. January is that month for me.
Long before Tom’s father died January 14, 2012, and my mother followed January 26, 2013, the first month of the year represented a period of Midwestern malaise, forced hibernation, and cold, lingering darkness.
Of course, I live in a warmer, brighter climate now (despite freezing temperatures the past few mornings). I am thankful for that, especially as Tom shares images of his sister and brother-in-law snow blowing and shoveling outside their suburban Chicago home.
Since my mother’s death nearly eleven years ago, the years have passed with a gauzy flutter like pages of a book swept away by a winter’s squall.
Yet January’s weary sensations–grief masked in a cocktail of Christmas memories, vanilla lip balm, and her last graceful smiles during breathing treatments designed to ease her congestive heart failure–appear on cue.
Last weekend, Tom and I packed away our Christmas decorations and recounted cherished memories of quiet holiday moments together and the adrenalin rush of my holiday concert. Adjusting to the rise and fall of this season is always a bittersweet process.
But this week I was eager to recoup our less-cluttered space. To move ahead. To read and write new pages. To protect, nurture, and regain a more normal rhythm away from the madness of news that reminds me–frequently–just how fragile our democracy has become.
My mother and father–who survived the Battle of the Bulge in World War II–would be horrified.
In the depths of 2020, my husband and I began a tradition of buying bouquets of flowers to place in a vase in our living room. As the walls and woes of Covid and our political angst closed in, it gave us hope to see a splash of color on our coffee table.
Less than ten days into 2024, like each of you I have my dreams and doubts, wonders and worries.
But writing about this spray of lavender carnations Tom and I brought home (then displayed in a smoky-blue ceramic pitcher my mother left behind, and placed atop a Spring-like, bird-laden runner my sister gave us for Christmas) helps me breathe, reflect, and relax.
Mark Johnson Stories 