On New Years Day, I read a blurb about CNN’s Anderson Cooper, who revealed he had offered, years ago, to host the annual countdown to midnight so that he could avoid the sadness of the anniversary of the loss of his father.

Wyatt Emory Cooper died on January 5, 1978. Anderson was just 10 years old.

Losing a parent when you’re just a kid must be awful. Indescribably so. Anderson is also mourning his mom, who passed away in June of this year.

[SideNote] This is an excellent book:

This 2016 book is a series of emails between the ever-traveling Anderson Cooper and his famous mother, Gloria Vanderbilt. Through electronic conversations, they were able to have discussions and ask questions that somehow never came up when they were face to face.

After finishing the tablet version of The Rainbow Comes and Goes, I told Mom about it and she was intrigued. Everyone likes Anderson, after all. Her problematic eyes caused her to hesitate when I offered to send her a hard copy. A life-long insatiable reader, Mom no longer carried a stack of books with her.

I sent it anyway.

And she loved it! The warm connection between mother and son, the history of their family, and the depth of their loss (Anderson’s college-aged older brother, Wyatt, suffered a tragic death), made it hard to put down. In fact, I think Mom read it twice and then passed it along to her sister. [/Sidenote]

Hearing recently from so many friends and family that “Christmas will never be the same” makes me wonder. When was Christmas ever without sorrow? How did my grandparents, for example, find a way to carry on and celebrate, knowing their parents, several siblings, and even infants were gone?

Somehow, they found a way. The alternative was so much worse than the struggle.

Dad and I talked over the phone about mourning yesterday. Talking helps. Reminiscing is a comfort, even when the stories catch in your throat. It suddenly hit me that falling into a depression would be a terrible disservice to Mom’s memory.

“Death leaves a heartache no one can heal; Love leaves a memory no one can steal.” – from an Irish headstone

At Mom’s wake, middle-brother Dave started off the tributes to Mom with the following:

My mother died in a library. The trips to and from the upstairs bedroom, with its tree-house views of the forest and its changing light from the comings and goings of the sun and moon, were becoming too difficult as age and disease took an increasing toll. The book-lined room downstairs was to become my parents’ new bedroom. In a matter of weeks the books were going to be removed since the shelves would now have to hold other objects, but before that could happen a crippling stroke put Mom, the trips upstairs now impossible, in a hospital bed surrounded by Ovid, Chaucer, and Shakespeare. Her last view was of two paintings: one of Dante, a fellow poet; the other, painted by her husband’s father, of a gathering of flowers.

Poetry, family, beauty: three touchstones my mother lived by.

Libby Larsen, a distinguished composer who I’m fortunate to call a friend, once told me that our era needs a new definition of genius, one that would honor an artist who finds ways to continue practicing her calling at a high level despite the many complicating responsibilities that life brings. Libby’s definition of genius perfectly fits Mom, who remained devoted to writing poetry in the midst of bringing up four children and managing a household along with enduring the upheavals of numerous moves. Her courage and persistence set a vital example for me as another lifelong artist.

One of the greatest compliments a composer or poet can receive is that she has her own distinct voice. While one can write perfectly acceptable work that’s clearly inspired by another poet or represents a school or ism of poetry, it’s something else entirely when the reader recognizes a unique human sensibility in the words on the page, the product of someone who perceives the world and communicates that vision in a way that is theirs alone. 

I’ve inherited Mom’s love of poetry, albeit as a reader rather than a writer; I try to read one or two poems a day, and over the years have had the pleasure of getting to know such great souls as Frost, Williams, Szymborska, Dickinson, Stone, Kunitz. As I reread a lifetime’s collection of Mom’s poetry recently, it became more and more obvious that she is the peer of such masterful poets, first and foremost because her way of speaking through poetry is, in its simplicity, clarity, imagination and vulnerability, like no one else’s. At the moment of her passing, it’s not hard to imagine the volumes around her murmuring: a tribute, a benediction, a welcome.

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