A sad, drooping December Rose.

In the Art Gallery
By Susan Browne

The painting of flowers
next to the painting of flames,
and I remember that time, years ago,
when the psychiatrist said, "You feel too much,
you are too sensitive, take these,"
giving me a bottle of pills. I took them
to the beach, watched light become flame
on the water, and along the ragged cliffs,
small flowers like blue stars,
the world a painting
I couldn't live in.
I opened the bottle, then put it down,
pills spilling on the sand.
Waves carried the flames
and didn't mind the burning,
the arising from and disappearing
into the vastness. I swam,
let the waves take me,
then treaded water, looking at the sky,
a silver tray full
of the most beautiful nothing.
I swam back, the water was black,
I could sink beyond caring,
but I wanted to live,
to be there
with the beauty and the burning
and let it be too much.

From: "Buddha's Dogs" by Susan Browne, page 59

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I've tried & tossed away every kind of anti-depressant there is. Maybe I should have kept taking them, but they all made me feel dead inside. Now I just feel invisible, sad & empty. So sad. I don't like holiday time ever since my cousins died in a car wreck when I was a kid. We went to two double funerals that year, two of them young children in tiny coffins. My aunt and uncle with whom we lived lost their only two adult children and all of their grandchildren in one fell swoop, killed by a drunk driver. It was a few weeks before Christmas and every year after that a black cloud settled on everyone...and how do you lose a black cloud that's been with you since childhood? I don't know.

~Marion

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"Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak whispers the o'er-fraught heart and bids it break." ~William Shakespeare

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She was no longer wrestling with the grief, but could sit down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her thoughts. ~George Eliot
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