Poetry Sunday: Little Lesson on How to Be by Kathryn Nuernberger

The death of someone you love is something that you never really get over. You learn to cope with it somehow and you move on. But you never really stop missing them in your life. There's a hole there that can never be filled.

Kathryn Nuernberger understands that. The woman in her poem lost her mother eighty years before but she has never stopped missing her. I lost my mother sixteen years ago and my life still feels her absence. My mother's name was Reba. Reba. 

Little Lesson on How to Be

by Kathryn Nuernberger

The woman at the Salvation Army who sorts and prices is in her eighties

and she underestimates the value of everything, for which I am grateful.

 

Lightly used snow suits, size 2T, are $6 and snow boots are $3.

 

There is a little girl, maybe seven, fiddling with a tea set. Her mother

inspects drapes for stains.

 

Sometimes the very old and lonely are looking for an opening.

 

She glances up from her pricing and says something about the tea set

and a baby doll long ago.

 

I am careful not to make eye contact, but the mother with drapes has

such softness in her shoulders and her face and she knows how to say

the perfect kind thing—“What a wonderful mother you had.”

 

“Yes, she was.”

 

Why do children sometimes notice us and sometimes not?

 

From the bin of dolls: “What happened to your mother?”

 

“She died.”

 

The woman at the Salvation Army who sorts and prices is crying a little.

She seems surprised to be crying. “It’s been eighty years and I still miss

her.”

 

When my daughter was born I couldn’t stop thinking about how we

were going to die. If we were drowning, would it be better to hold her

to me even as she fought away or should I let her float off to wonder why

her mother didn’t help her? What if it’s fire and I have one bullet left? I

made sure my husband knew if there were death squads and he had to

choose, I’d never love him again if he didn’t choose her. If I’m lucky,

her crying face is the last thing I’ll see.

 

The mother with drapes is squeezing her daughter’s shoulder, trying to

send a silent message, but children are children. “Why did she die?”

 

“She was going to have a baby and—And she died.”

 

“But she was a wonderful mother.”

 

I’m holding a stack of four wooden jigsaw puzzles of farm animals,

dinosaurs, jungle animals, and pets. Each for a quarter.

 

“It’s silly how much I still miss her.” She takes out a tissue and wipes

her eyes and then her nose.

 

When my grandmother threw her sister, Susie, a 90^th birthday party,

one hundred people came, including 5 of the 6 brothers and sisters. At

dusk only a few of us were left, nursing beers with our feet kicked up

on the bottom rungs of various walkers.

 

Susie said then to my grandmother, “Can you think of all the people

watching us in heaven now? And our mother must be in the front row.”

 

Grandma took her sister’s hand. “Our mother—Estelle.”

 

“Yes—her name was Estelle. I forgot that.”

 

They looked so happy then, saying her name back and forth to each

other. Estelle. Estelle.