Revenants

Susanna Lang:

My father died in 2015, after 15 years of decline that were painful for him to live and for family and friends to watch. In his last years, he could only move from place to place in a wheelchair, unable to manage his most basic needs. My mother could no longer care for him in their apartment, so he entered “supported living,” a nursing home space within their building where he was isolated from the larger community. He was also increasingly hard of hearing, and all of this meant that he could no longer interact with others, though conversation and relationship had been at the heart of his life. Perhaps he would have experienced dementia in any case, as it ran in his family, but I believe that the narrowing of his life deepened his dementia; though I also found that if I listened to his speech as I listen to poems, with attention to metaphor, he made perfect sense. I wrote about all of this in poem after poem during those 15 years, and then I wrote a long elegy the summer after his death—or, more accurately, that elegy poured out of me that summer during a residency at the Hambidge Center in the Blue Ridge Mountains. And then I thought I was done. I was so wrong: periodically another elegy would insist on being written. “Revenants” is from 2021. Usually I revise obsessively, but this poem appears to have emerged whole. I can only find one draft in my files, and my critique group had no questions or suggestions—which may have been the only time that happened. I do not write as therapy, but writing is a way to find meaning and even beauty in all aspects of life, even those that bring loss and pain.