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RE: L.A. Guitar Quartet - 4 Variations on Twinkle Twinkle Little Star - Music
I considered my heart a traitor for continuing to beat - that's a poem in itself!
Three years to recover (to function again, in the ways we must, on a daily basis) - that's intense. Sometimes I think I have never recovered (functioned properly) in the aftermath of those "phoenix" events Skenazy writes of. Some people rise above it all, stronger and more altruistic. Others merely cope. And some go to pieces. (See "Rachel's Contrition" by Michelle Buckman.) I hope you're saving up all these posts (replies), Cory - yours are always keepers!
Thank you, @carolkean.
Yes, with that line I was actually quoting myself, from I piece I wrote about a year and a half after his death, that was not a poem, but did wind up being a spoken word piece I read publicly a couple of times.
I did it as an exercise in metaphor for a nature writing course I was taking online.
It was the usual high school exercise; take a word from Column A and a word from Column B, and form your own unique metaphor, with a paragraph or two in explanation. And while it wasn't called a freewrite, in essence that's what it turned out to be, as it was pure stream of consciousness for twenty or thirty minutes.
And, once I had written it, there, finally, was what I had been trying to say all along. It just poured out of me onto the paper. I have changed it very little from that day.
My resulting metaphor was "Death is Like an Avalanche," which I posted here on Steemit about two weeks ago.
And yes, I went through all the responses to grief you've mentioned. But that's for my next post, and thanks for the inspiration, yet again. ;-)
"I considered my heart a traitor for continuing to beat -" no surprise that the line has struck a chord in others, and you'd written it and read it publicly long before the words resonated here at Steeemit. You have so, so, so many stories to tell! Have you read @tygertyger's family history? Somehow I sense you both have something in common as writers - a sense of history, family, place, passion, and culture - hers may be mostly Russian, partly Czech, but nationality isn't the common element. The gift of story is.
I wasn't aware of @tygertyger's family history, but I've come across her posts from time to time, including yesterday.
Clearly there is a reason for that, and I thank you for bringing her to my attention, as I will make a point of seeing more of her work. And interesting, as my husband is Polish, one of my best friends is Ukrainian, and one of my sister's daughter's-in-law is Czech, so that part of the world has long been on my personal radar.
Thanks again.