Today’s episode is guest hosted by Myka Kielbon.

Transcript

I’m Myka Kielbon and this is The Slowdown.

My mother was, for thirty-five years, a flight nurse. She conducted hospital-to-hospital transport of patients who needed a higher level of care. In Western Washington and the greater Pacific Northwest an ambulance ride would take too long. It was hard work physically and emotionally. There was danger to it, too. Twice, helicopters crashed into the water, killing both nurses and the pilot, my mom’s colleagues. There were days where my mother and her crew lost a patient, and after a twenty-four-hour shift, having witnessed death, she would come home to mother three children.

In the last year, my mother opened up to me about her journeys in grief, with her colleagues and with the loss of her parents. Most of the pilots that she worked with were ex-military, many of the Vietnam generation. They learned, in their youth, that hardest lesson — how to keep on when you lose the person beside you. Who you knew. Who could have been you. She told me the pilots taught her and the other survivors how to work through that grief.

My parents were in their late thirties after the first crash, raising two little kids, their community full of young families like them. My grandfather would die that year, too. I learned that I was born into that time of grief. Maybe it’s why I’m the poet of the family. Humans are permeable to loss in that way.

Grief feels, sometimes, like a burden. A heavy one. But it is also a practice. People we love leave this earth, but they don’t leave us. We can find lightness in small rituals, small memorials to share with the world the version of the person that we have folded up inside of ourselves. A shot of well whiskey and a Miller High Life will take me to someone I miss and need to be with, even if just for a moment.

While I am on this earth, I know myself by who I love. When someone I love leaves the earth, the love is still there. Those who remain in a community form a lifeline, and a knowing touch can buoy us back up from the depths.

Today’s poem finds solace in the people with whom we share the dead, and finds connection, too, in the landscapes with which we share life.

My Father Flying
by Jan Beatty

The year after my father died, 
I walked around to his places. 
Not the cemetery, but to his people. 
The Texaco where he took 
his old Ford Fairlane for repair, 
½ mile from the house. 

I lugged two six packs of Iron City 
to the mechanics—Chuck just out 
of high school and older Joe, his round 
belly hanging over his belt, so big 
he rested it on the cars like a second body. 
We told stories until the beer was gone. 

I walked into my father's VFW, 
Elmer J. Zeiler Post #5012, said 
I was my father's daughter. 
Good man, the old bartender said. 
The two slumped-over vets at the bar 
bobbed their heads and raised their beers. 

After that, I saw my father flying. 
In the trees by the old roads—a glimpse, 
a wind shudder in the red maple 
while everyday people kept walking 
behind the shopping center. 
A white patch in the December branches. 

I'd pull over and look, and knew 
he lived in the bends and curves, 
the familiar sky, everywhere. 
That was the year I looked up. 
In that year after—
he was living everywhere. 

"My Father Flying" from DRAGSTRIPPING by Jan Beatty © 2024 Jan Beatty. Used by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.