For Kathy When the black rider comes with iron fist between the stones of dark and light to stop your breath and blind your sight and take you, bound, into that night: you are not easy in your rest. Not easy seeking out the light and why this dark’s so hard and bright and nothing left to be confessed: you give us all your best, or second-best, whatever you have to stake to fight, your love, your fear, your need to be at least someone who does not want to die, just to please God, or just for spite. It is not easy that last goodnight.
—Michael Warren—
Unnatural
By Kelly Hayes-Raitt HayesRaitt@aol.com
L
ast week, a friend of mine lost her son. “Lost” is such a ridiculous word. He died. “Lost” implies she somehow misplaced him in the deli section in WalMart, when, in fact, he will never be found. I don’t fully understand this loss, this unspeakable, irrevocable loss. While I’ve been pregnant and I grok the deep sense of creating life – the
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El Ojo del Lago / January 2019
merging of DNA that is a one-timeonly opportunity – I don’t know that feeling of feeling a new being growing and developing its own personality in my belly. I don’t know that feeling of birthing a new human, of raising a new human, of launching a new human into the world with the entirely normal expectation that he or she will continue beyond my lifespan. “It’s so unnatural,” my mother always said about her daughter’s and her son’s deaths. It is so unnatural. Yet, my friend lost her son last week. Ed. Note: Kelly Hayes-Raitt writes about refugees. She is an award-winning author of several essays and has written How to Become a Housesitter: insider Tips from the HouseSit Diva, available at Amazon (http://amzn. to/2hlj7UP) or her web site (www. HouseSitDiva. com). She is her mother’s only surKelly Hayes-Raitt viving child.