It may seem a strange choice for the season of good cheer, but my poem for today’s roundup is one I wrote last year just before Thanksgiving. It was inspired by the news that a pilot of a small multi-engine aircraft had taken off from the airport where my husband works, and promptly crashed. His business in town was done, and he’d been on his way home for Thanksgiving.
I didn’t know him. Neither did my husband, to whom the man called out a cheery greeting as he breezed through the hangar on his way to take off. But I wrote this the next morning in an effort to lift him out of our impersonal public language for death. Because I wrote it down, I’ll probably always remember this stranger on Thanksgiving, and remember too that for some the holiday season can inaugurate the worst grief and loneliness of the year. It gives a bittersweet edge to my own pleasure and thankfulness — something else to be thankful for, if it brings greater compassion.
Obituary for a Stranger
I woke this morning
to the cheery tenor of the radio voice
stating courteously that a pilot had died.
He moved on to the governor’s visit,
then the weather report.
The dead should only be declared
by those who love them.
To start, he was not “a pilot.”
In those final frantic seconds
less than a minute into the air
plunged into a dark bowl of soup
in a sputtering, unwilling vessel,
surely he was a man.
And though his name is not released,
surely it is known,
surely he is loved:
perhaps husband, perhaps father,
perhaps uncle or brother or cousin.
Surely he is a son whose first outraged cries
brought answering tears of joy from proud parents.
He grasped the complex workings
of engine and physics and weather and weight –
could fly in blind conditions
had bravery to try
and faith to trust the instruments
when sensation deceives.
“We prayed for the person in the crash,” cry my children
clamoring to the stairs for their first glimpse
of Daddy arriving home.
“I’m so glad,” he replies gently. “Because he’s gone to see Jesus now.”
In the wisdom of children, they fall silent.
When all the created masterpiece of a human being
is crushed into eternity
it’s not the chatter of news,
but the voices of those who loved him
that should break the silence.
I remember reading this last year and it brought tears to my eyes again.
Oh, this brings tears. One of the contributors to “Guys Lit Wire died unexpectedly over Thanksgiving break. It’s so strange, those of us who “know” each other here in cyberspace — this captures that essence beautifully; we pray for the family, and stay silent.
Yesterday, in Colorado, seven people died in a crash about fifty miles north of Denver. Names have not been released yet, but it’s believed they were a family from Canada. I can’t stop wondering what fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles are having to deal with this huge hole in their lives. Thank you for putting words around this tragedy.
Gorgeous and wrenching. The third and the last stanzas are my favorites. Thanks for sharing this.
Laura
I love the fifth stanza. It’s reminds me that each person holds a lifetime of facts, memories, knowledge. No one else has the same combination of “complex workings.”
What a wonderful tribute.
I’ve often winced at the ways news anchors can so casually report a death and then in the next breath put on a smile and talk about something else casually.
Your poem made me cry. How very very sad for his family.
This is beautiful. Thanks for bringing it back to share again this year.
that was lovely, it made me cry too.
I have a good friend who died the day after Thanksgiving many years ago. I was thinking about her this weekend and wondering how her family is doing. Your poem just captures the heartbreak. Thanks.
Beautiful, Janet. Thanks for sharing it.
Thank you for the comments… I see that we’ve all felt these things, about people we know well, or not at all.
It’s strange, but not until I read through these comments did I remember that Emily Dickinson wrote a poem about this subject too — “Bereavement in their death to feel.” She writes that strangers don’t mourn; death makes friends of us all.
And now the tragedy of the Walmart worker trampled to death…it is indeed bittersweet when sorrow and celebration hold hands.