Obituary for a Stranger

I wrote this poem about a year ago, 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 the holiday.

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.

–Janet Goodrich