You can be fancy and weeping.
There’s a certain formality, a ceremonial aspect to a cloth hanky that disposables cannot reach. You throw those away as if grief could be let go with one swipe. Everyone knows grief recycles, which is why a cloth hanky makes a good container for returning tears.
My grandmother gave me one with ponies. I keep it as a memento of her, not to cry in, but to take out and hold, the kind I would wave if someone I loved were leaving on a ship, the little horses on the red-edged square cantering goodbye in the growing space after the horn blows and the ship eases away.
She is gone now, and gone the tears at her quiet passing as we stood around the community hospital room, talking her into the letting go. When she left, exactly, we couldn’t say to the minute, but we all stopped as if our breaths were hers and looked at her, stilled there. We didn’t have a place for our grief, only our hands sweeping tears into our hairlines.
She bore a hard life, five children, a husband lost young, 1935 a winter so cold he could only be buried after spring thawed a plot, sodden hankies in pockets balled into fists.
(Note: Meg gave me permission to use her line in this piece).
Coffins We Carry
My mother became a kind of death to my dad’s mother, who lost her own at 16. I wonder if that’s where my grandmother’s grasping came from, a yoke to keep her son working the farm.
You can’t turn your children’s feet into roots. The heart and all its trailing vessels walk a body where it wants to go, for my father toward risk, away from duty that hobbles love with asterisks.
My mother had her own emptiness, so much taken when cancer took her father. She was 10. All certainty of corn, sky, home—lost; in town, suppers of bread and gravy after boarders had their fill of everything else.
Jane C. Miller is co-author of the poetry collection, Walking the Sunken Boards (Pond Road Press, 2019) and associate editor of the online poetry journal, Quartet (www.quartetjournal.com). Her debut collection, Canticle for Remnant Days (Pond Road Press, 2024) is available through Barnes & Noble, Amazon and her website.