Elise Maclay

Elise Maclay's GREEN WINTER, a lovingly written and compiled collection of meditations - free verse poetry, really, and, often, prayers even - on growing old and dying, was first published by Reader's Digest Press in 1977. My own copy of the book is a 1990 Revised Edtion hardback from Henry Holt & Company. When my Mother died this year at 96, I found in her papers two pieces from GW that she had typed and saved: "My Children Are Coming Today" and "Occupational Therapy." I don't know how long ago Mom first read these poems and was moved by them enough to copy and save them. But, remembering Mom's final months - spent in in a nursing home when she could no longer stand or walk, wracked with almost constant pain - reading those lines brought me to tears. And still do. Here are a few lines from the first -

"My children are coming today. They mean well. But they worry.
They think I should have a railing in the hall. A telephone in the kitchen. They want someone to come in when I take a bath.
They really don't like my living alone ...

When they were young and climbed trees and rode bicycles and went away to camp, I was terrified. But I let them go.
Because to hold them would have hurt them.
Now our roles are reversed. Help them see.
Keep me from being grim or stubborn about it. But don't let me let them smother me."

The other poem, "Occupational Therapy" gives us a voice from a nursing home, a woman who prefers to close her eyes and remember her long rich life as a young girl, wife and mother, rather than "make baskets" or arrange "glittery beads ... to make jewelry." Of the occupational therapist attempting to coax her from her beloved reveries she says -

"She's a dear child and means well,
So I tell her I might
Some other day."

I'm so glad I found this book. Because it is filled with many examples of the kind of so often unvoiced wisdom that can only come from long lives filled with all manner of experiences, both good and bad. I can see Mom's long life in so many of these 'poems.' Some make me smile. Many make me weep, understaning a bit better all she endured, all the things she kept from me, protecting me. Making me wish we could talk now, just one more time.

I've probably not said it very well, but if you have lost a beloved and aged parent, this book is a balm. It will help.

In the preface, author Maclay says:

"Anyone could have written this book. Anyone can write a book like it. The references - and points of reference - walk a little way ahead of all of us who are not yet old, saying with their breath and being and our shared humanness (although their words seem to be about other things), 'We are you later on.'"

Amen. And thank you, Elise Maclay, for this lovely little book. Highly recommended.… (más)