James Crews: The hard thing about creating art from our pain is that on some level, we have to relive the pain, reenter those emotions that we felt. But I do think that there is a great usefulness in that, even if we're just journaling about it, to face the pain, to fully feel it, so that it can do its work in us.

[00:00:21] Sarah Cavanaugh: Welcome to Peaceful Exit, the podcast where we talk to creatives about death, dying grief, and also life. I'm Sarah Cavanaugh and my guest today is poet James Crews. He's published a number of poetry collections and anthologies, including his latest, “Turning Toward Grief.” In this episode, James reflects on losing his father at a young age and later losing his mother and two grandmothers in the same year. James also explains why even messy, imperfect writing can help carry us forward when we're grieving. He poses two questions that we can all ponder: what do we lose when we turn away from grief, and what do we gain when we lean in?

Welcome to Peaceful Exit.

[00:01:08] James Crews: Thank you so much for having me.

[00:01:10] Sarah Cavanaugh: I'm so looking forward to our conversation because we have a mutual friend, Kristi Nelson, and she was kind enough to introduce us and, well, I can't say enough wonderful things about her.

[00:01:22] James Crews: Yeah, Kristi is an amazing person. And, uh, she's a great connector of people too.

[00:01:27] Sarah Cavanaugh: She was just such an important guest in our conversations around how do we change our story about death? In this culture especially we seem to avoid the subject and be very reticent to talk about it.

[00:01:41] James Crews: Absolutely. I mean, that's certainly been my experience and growing up we didn't talk about death. I was often kept from funerals, but all these experiences have helped me to see death as a great awakening force in my own life.

[00:01:56] Sarah Cavanaugh: Yeah. Well, your anthology — beautiful cover, by the way, “How to Love the World.” You have a number of poets in here, that I love. Naomi Shihab Nye is on the back cover, so many I can't even name. How did you select the poems you include in this volume?

[00:02:14] James Crews: I am a collector of poems, as a poet myself. I actually grew up printing out poems and just taping them to the walls of my bedroom so that I would be surrounded by poetry all the time. And so it's no surprise that in addition to my own books of poetry, part of how I make a living is gathering and sharing poetry by other people.

[00:02:35] Sarah Cavanaugh: It's beautiful. And your prompts are really, really wonderful. Well, let's talk about your most recent book. In the introduction to “Turning Toward Grief,” you discuss losing your father when you were 20, and then later losing two grandmothers and your mother in the same year. How are all of these experiences of grief different for you?

[00:02:52] James Crews: Well, the loss of my father when I was 20 years old was the most difficult, the most harrowing for me, in part because my mother had a lot of mental health issues growing up and she was not well physically. So she had always been the one who was sick or the one who needed extra help. And my father, on the other hand, could fix anything and was the rock of our family. And so when it was discovered that he had hepatitis C before it could be cured and that it was beginning to affect his liver, he got sick very fast and so there was very little time to process what was happening. I think for me, I was so young, you know, my father died before I had a chance to actually come out to him as a gay man. And so I wasn't really able to connect with him as the person I would eventually become. And I, I think that was one thing that was really hard and stung for many years. But in the grieving process, I kind of realized that there were these small moments that we had shared over time when he let me know that he knew who I was. You know, there was a moment when we were all driving in the car and he just looked in the rearview mirror and just out of the blue said something like, “I just want you to know your mother and I will love you no matter what.” And of course, like I didn't want my secret to come out at the time and was afraid of sharing the truth, so I just shrugged it off. Twenty years later, when I had these other losses of my mother and both of my grandmothers, really the women who all raised me, in the very same kind of six month period — I would love to say that I, I sort of knew what to expect, but I think I really had taken for granted the presence of my loved ones again, and my own health and my own mortality.

[00:05:09] Sarah Cavanaugh:I love what you said about your dad's comment in the car. Do you think he knew?

[00:05:15] James Crews: I do think he knew. There was another poem that I wrote from a moment we shared together, when I had come home from being out way too late, you know, at a place I had no business going to.You know, I still had some eyeliner on and was hungover and whatever. But that next morning there was this tacit acknowledgement in retrospect, where he just poured me a glass of orange juice and kind of said, you know, “You were out pretty late last night.” I felt the acceptance, the embrace, coming from him in a way that I think has fed me over the years since I first retrieved that memory. So I think he did know, I know that my mother knew for years before I finally told her as well.

[00:06:02] Sarah Cavanaugh: Your father sounds like a very loving man. Was his death the first experience of losing someone close to you?

[00:06:08] James Crews: It was the first experience of losing someone that close to me. I really didn't have much experience in navigating loss or even thinking about what death actually meant.

[00:06:22] Sarah Cavanaugh: You write that there's something about grief that can't be captured by everyday language.

[00:06:27] James Crews: And yet here I am, a poet, trying to capture it in everyday language. I think that is the essential challenge, and I think that's part of what makes it so difficult for us to talk to someone who has been in grief, especially fresh grief. It's why we don't always pick up the phone, why we don't always send that message or show up at the person's door — because we don't know what to say. And the truth is saying that you don't know what to say is sometimes the best thing. You know, showing up anyway and admitting the truth, that we don't know what to say, I think is so helpful and such a comfort to the person who is grieving. It certainly was for me. I can remember first getting the news of my mother's death and it came from my husband 'cause we happened to be in Canada for work. And my cell phone wasn't working, his cell phone had worked. And so he got the call that she had passed away. I remember him sitting with me just minutes later and saying something like, “I don't even half know what to say right now, so I'm just gonna sit with you.” And that was one of the most beautiful things that anyone has ever said to me, in a time of grief or sorrow, and it's inspired me to understand what I need myself when I'm hurting, and what might benefit others when they're in a place of pain.

[00:07:46] Sarah Cavanaugh: I was grieving a great deal at the end of the 1990s, the last century, and my brother who played the guitar would just come and sit and play. Music is so healing.

[00:07:57] James Crews: And I think it's why so many people turn to poetry in the midst of loss. Just as with music, I think when our minds can go quiet and we can just kind of receive whatever image or whatever language is kind of floating on the air around us.

[00:08:16] Sarah Cavanaugh: I love that. So the title of your book, “Turning Toward Grief” — you admit that after your father died, you turned away from grief. What happens when you turn away?

[00:08:41] James Crews:What happens when you turn away is that you end up burying a lot of those feelings, those unprocessed feelings. And you miss out on the other side of grief, which is gratefulness, which is joy, delight, wonder. One of the reasons I wanted to write this book, which was very hard to write and which I very much resisted doing at first, was that I wanted to reassure myself and other people that these other qualities were a part of the grieving process. That grief is not monolithic, and just because we are suffering or others around us are suffering, doesn't mean that we don't also get to feel delight and joy or get to feel grateful that we are still alive and on this planet. You know, the title was a difficult one for me because I didn't want to turn away people who are in mourning, who are in grief and say, yes, let's turn toward grief. That's not a very fun message to hear. But I think when we do, we realize that we let in so much more of the world

[00:09:45] Sarah Cavanaugh: It's so important for us to realize that when you do experience deep, deep sadness and darkness, it almost stretches your ability to feel joy and it just expands your capacity.

[00:10:00] James Crews: I think it's, it's how we grow our own hearts. It's how we widen the aperture of the heart is to say, sorrow, you're welcome there too. Joy, yes, you know, not turning away from joy. Because I think as a culture, we need help with both. I know that I do, I need help with staying with my grief as well as staying with my deep joy

[00:10:24] Sarah Cavanaugh: What did it feel like to you to turn toward grief and embrace all of it?

[00:10:29] James Crews: It felt necessary, I would say. And I think that was only because I knew what it felt like to turn away from the grief and to turn toward drugs, alcohol, distraction when I was a kid, and I forgive myself. I was 20 years old, of course that was going to be my strategy, probably, for, you know, dealing with my grief and difficulty at the time. But it felt like a necessity. And it was only these little glimmers, these little moments of hope that shone through, that kind of taught me it won't always feel this way. There was this subtle shift that happens, especially where I live here in Vermont, that's very similar to when the winter starts to edge towards spring and things melt. Things start to emerge, but it's painfully slow almost to come out of that deep winter. And I sort of have a poem about this. I don't know if you'd be interested in hearing a poem.

[00:11:31] Sarah Cavanaugh: I’d Love that. Yeah.

[00:11:33] James Crews: Thanks, Sarah. So this was one of those moments when I realized that I, I wasn't always going to feel this way. This is the poem, A Slice of Actual Light.

And then one day life placed a slice of actual light on your plate. Instead of the usual portion of grief you thought would be your daily meal for the rest of your time on earth. You just turned and saw a patch of winter sun sliding up and down the wall beside the bed. Last gasp of daylight. So inviting. How could you not reach out and touch the heat that had slipped through a momentary crack in the clouds? Now believe this will keep happening. These glimmers gathering to overtake the long shadow of sorrow for whole minutes, even hours at a time.

[00:12:42] Sarah Cavanaugh: When I read this poem, you captured something that happened all the time, and since my mother died, about 23 years ago. There'll be a moment when I'm feeling like I really miss her, and then there'll be a, a strange light on the wall and it'll be flickering. And you talk about the glimmers and the lights, and I so appreciated that, capturing that moment when you realize that, you know, they're around

[00:13:15] James Crews: It felt like such a gift. It felt like a visitation, and it had been such a, a dark day. I did not expect this light to kind of be this living presence next to me on the wall. And it, it, we often get this burst, this last burst of sunlight here, even if it hasn't been a sunny day, uh, when the sun is going down, and I imagine that's what was happening. But it also did feel otherworldly.

[00:13:41] Sarah Cavanaugh: So just below the poems in each, uh, section here, for every single poem, you provide context about the poem's meaning and why you wrote it. There's also an invitation to write and reflect, and what moves you to be so inclusive with your readers?

[00:14:01] James Crews: Well, thank you for using that word actually, that, I think that's a beautiful word for my intention with my readers. I think what moves me is partly that I've always really been a poet since I was a kid, and I have felt like I was surrounded by people who didn't quite understand what I do or, you know, what I love. Even as I was taping up those poems all over my bedroom wall, you know, my parents would come in like, huh, hmm, interesting. That's different. You know, they had this kind of view of me as this strange child that they didn’t, they didn't quite know where I came from. And I've grown to love that. I never blamed my parents. I don't expect people to just rush forth and love poetry. But because I love it, I have always wanted to bring people in and show them that the kind of poetry that's out there that you can't understand, that you read and you just kind of scratch your head, and that's, you know, maybe slightly on the pretentious side, that's not the only kind of poetry that exists. That people are writing poems that not only can be understood, but can also be useful for our lives. You know, they can be beacons in a time of grief. Poems can be read at the dinner table, read before a meeting shared in a classroom of 10-year-old kids. So there are all kinds of poems, and I've always wanted to bring people in not just to the poem, but my own process, just to let them know that it's not reserved for people in the ivory tower — that anybody can understand a poem and certainly anyone can write a poem My own writing practice while I've been grieving in all times of my life has really saved me. You know, at first when I've lost someone, I've usually written very poorly about it. I've, you know, because you're only able to scratch the surface of what you're feeling initially. But I just allowed it to be messy, allowed it to be whatever kind of writing it wanted to be. And so I encourage other folks to do that too. Just let the writing be something that carries you forward.

[00:16:22] Sarah Cavanaugh: Before this collection, how explicitly had you written about grief and loss, and how did writing these poems about grief change or impact your relationship with it?

[00:16:33] James Crews: I had written a book, uh, years ago about, not solely about, but largely about the loss of my father. It was called "Telling My Father." I loved the process of writing that book because many of those moments that I've talked about that I retrieved came back to me. And I thought like, oh, okay, I've written my grief book, now I've gotten that outta the way and maybe I won't write about my father as much anymore. I mean, how naive can you be, right? Um, but I did believe that. and of course was very quickly proven wrong because grief is an ever evolving, ever changing process. It's really a neverending story that we live through constantly throughout our lives. This book in particular I would say brought about a greater intimacy with my own pain, my own emotional landscape. I think that in order to be fully human, we have to be seen and we have to allow ourselves to be heard. And that means that we also have to share our pain. And the thing I resisted the most with this book was, somehow the poems were more comfortable for me. But when you have to actually write about what each poem is about and give that context, and gosh, that, that was a heavy lift. I had trouble getting into the writing of that and just surrendering to that process. The hard thing about creating art from our pain is that on some level we have to relive the pain, reenter those emotions that we felt. But I do think that there is a great usefulness in that, even if we're just journaling about it, to face the pain and to fully feel it so that it can do its work in us.

[00:18:20] Sarah Cavanaugh: I find what you're saying so interesting because I've never thought about writing the poem, and then writing about the poem, and what comes from that as part of the healing.

[00:18:31] James Crews: Yeah. It's not something that most poets typically do. And the first time I really did this actually was the anthology that you first mentioned, in “How to Love the World.” I have these reflections and writing prompts about mostly other people's poems. And I realized just in hearing from a lot of people who read that book that those reflections really spoke to them and they loved having this deeper window into the poem. And I thought, well, gosh, I'm the poet, I'm the writer of my own poem, only I can really give that behind the scenes look into it.

[00:19:11] Sarah Cavanaugh: Tell us about the mantra you used when you were taking care of your mother — “it doesn't take much” — and what this means to you even years later.

[00:19:19] James Crews: I think that mantra has always been with me, and that's been part of my practice as a poet, as a, a meditator — to be really alive to the fact that it doesn't take much to restore and renew myself, especially during a difficult time. So five or 10 minutes spent meditating is enough to kind of reawaken us to make the world fresh again. And I think what I also realized, it doesn't take much to really show up for people and to have these small, beautiful moments that will stay with us for the rest of our lives. I remember being in the hospital with my mother and her breakfast coming and just cutting up the sort of rubbery pancakes. I mean, she loved them. I thought they were a little rubbery. And, um, you know, pouring the syrup on them, feeding her those pancakes, feeding her those scrambled eggs. That's a moment that will always be with me.

[00:20:25] Sarah Cavanaugh: What does it mean to be radically gentle with yourself in the face of loss?

[00:20:30] James Crews: For me, it means allowing myself to feel whatever comes up, you know, if it feels right to wallow on a given day, to wallow, to be gentle with myself in that way. I think that we sometimes try too hard to be resilient and try too hard to be the responsible ones, and take pride in going back to work before we really feel like going back to work if we don't have to. So radical gentleness for me is just a lot of checking in with the self and seeing what feels right in this moment. And sometimes it means disappointing a lot of people. It means saying no to things and yes to things that you really want to be doing. And the radical gentleness is knowing that that voice that wants to kind of beat yourself up for doing that is gonna be present there. But letting it know that it's in service of a larger sense of self care, and that we don't always have to be good, you know, other people's definition of what constitutes being good.

[00:21:52] Sarah Cavanaugh: I would love to hear you read again.

[00:21:54] James Crews: Absolutely.

[00:21:55] Sarah Cavanaugh: The poem I would love to hear is on page 143. It's called Strict Diet. I lost my father recently but when I read it, I thought of my dad.

[00:22:06] James Crews: One of the reasons I included this poem, it's, it's a little bit of an older poem, I wrote this closer to the time after I lost my father. I wanted to include it because I hear from so many people who have encountered this poem — it was included as part of The Poetry Foundation, something that they were doing years ago — people still write to me occasionally and they say, you know, I had the exact same experience. It was different food, usually it's different kinds of food, but, you know, the milkshake that my father or my mother was craving toward the end, and they weren't really supposed to have, but we went ahead and got it for them anyway. There is this sense that if we had known how it would turn out, we would've been much more permissive, and just let them have what they loved, and so this poem was steeped in that. This is Strict Diet

Though the doctors said, no salt, salt was all my father craved. His legs, swollen skin, waterlogged and gray. Still, he wanted potato chips, honey baked ham, greasy slabs of polish sausage from the deli. He begged for pepperoni pizza, garlic butter, ribs, slathered in sauce. But when I did the shopping, I searched only for labels that said low sodium and no preservatives. Bringing home heads of broccoli, turkey burgers, shredded wheat. And when he died anyway, guilt gnawed me like an ulcer. How could I have denied him those few final pleasures? Until I found Big Mac wrappers stuffed under the car seat, jars of pickles in the hall closet, and hidden among wads of tissues near his nightstand, his stash: a half used canister of salt. I sat down on his sagging mattress, now stripped of stained sheets, and studied that blue label with a girl in the yellow dress holding her umbrella against a rain of salt falling from the sky.

[00:24:39] Sarah Cavanaugh: I had this image as you were speaking of my dad holding a Costco sized bag of M-and-Ms he used to hide.

[00:24:48] James Crews: That sounds appropriate. And I was gonna say, as I was reading this, I was thinking, you know, sometimes poets make things up for effect. This is all true. We found these things and many other things, hidden throughout the house, stuffed beneath the car seat in the pocket of the door.

[00:25:04] Sarah Cavanaugh: Did he have someone who was sneaking it for him, or was he able to get out?

[00:25:08] James Crews: He was able to get out pretty close to the end, I mean, he was very stubborn, like a lot of dads are. Yeah, probably my brother might have colluded a little bit with him and, yeah, so my guess is he got each of us to kind of be a little lenient and then collectively just still had everything he wanted.

[00:25:28] Sarah Cavanaugh: Scarlet Tanager. So many years ago when my mother got her diagnosis and we were all a bit stunned and shocked, I was sitting with her on the side of her bed and she had a view out to the garden and there was a bird bath out there. We were sitting in silence, just trying to absorb this diagnosis, this new world, 'cause she was diagnosed with stage four cancer. A brilliant bird appeared, I had never seen before or since, I've never seen one since. And it was a Western Tanager, native to the Pacific Northwest. But I still have never seen one. I've only seen one, and I've only seen it in that moment. And I, I think we both just caught our breath in that moment, and your poem brought me right back to that.

James Crews: Thank you. Did you want me to read that one as well?

[00:26:19] Sarah Cavanaugh: I would love that.

[00:26:20] James Crews: Yeah, scarlet tanagers, I think they don't like to be seen and so they are quite rare. Even here in Vermont, we live in the middle of the woods and I've only seen a handful in the decade that I've been around here and this one came very fast on the heels of my mother's death. So as you describe, it was something that really grabbed my attention. It does catch your breath in your throat

Scarlet Tanager.

Moving on is the hardest part of loss. As the months add up, you realize you will love again your one strong cup of coffee each morning, even looking forward to the dribble of cream. You will smile and laugh and feel amazed, as the dead cannot, by the sight of a scarlet tanager flashing between tree branches and vanishing before you can even say its name, leaving a faint imprint of color on the otherwise ordinary air to remind you what once was there.

[00:27:41] Sarah Cavanaugh: Thank you for bringing me back there.

[00:27:43] James Crews: Yeah. Well, thank you.

[00:27:45] Sarah Cavanaugh: You write in The Clearing, “at the center of every fear is a clearing, and though you must trudge for miles in the dark woods to get there, it's worth the trip.” Can you talk about this feeling of the journey through grief being worth the trip? How the death of a loved one might reveal to us what we most care about?

[00:28:08] James Crews: The most difficult piece of being in grief is the absence. For me, I was looking after my mother. Even though we lived in different places, I was really her emotional support. And so part of my trudge through the woods was an incredible and deep loss of purpose in the world because I had, I had gotten so much purpose and meaning from loving her and giving her so much attention. We are not going to be spared death, other people we love are not gonna be spared death. And so that is also part of the trudge through the woods to the clearing is knowledge that feels new maybe, but is not new, of course. You know, we knew this on some level. It's just a sudden loss, a deep loss, kind of reveals the inevitability of the fact that we too will face our own death. That our loved ones are going to go through the same thing. Just staying in touch with that fact I think keeps us present to the gifts that are right here, in spite of everything else that's happening in the larger world, in our personal world. And I just want to hold death and grief close to turn toward them so that I don't miss the rightsizing that can happen. So I don't get lost in pain or discomfort or why did this have to happen to me? Knowing that all of these other beauties, all of these other joys and delights, are coexisting with whatever pain, whatever discomfort and suffering is visiting us in a certain moment.

[00:30:00] Sarah Cavanaugh: Are there any poems you'd like to read that you haven't read already?

[00:30:04] James Crews: There is one little one, if you wouldn't mind my sharing it. It goes back to what I was saying earlier about making my pain and my grief visible, and I think a lot of people who deal with loss, part of the hard part of it is having to explain it and share it with people over and over again, and walking through a world that's just proceeding as it always has, knowing that your own internal world, personal world is completely altered. So this poem touches on that, and it's called Made Visible.

Some days I wish our pain was visible, that our grief gave off a slide glimmer from the center of the chest, so that as we walked down the street shifting a bag of olive oil and bread from one hand to the other, every passerby might see a glow lifting off of us like moonlight on broken water and know to soften their eyes and whisper, Hello.

[00:31:21] Sarah Cavanaugh: I love that poem because it calls forward cultures that actually do express their grief either in their clothing, or the way they wear their hair, or cut their hair. I mean, there are ways that as human beings we can say, we are in grief. Be gentle with us. Were you with your father or your mother when they died?

[00:31:44] James Crews: In both cases, I was not there when they died. And I really struggled with that fact because I had been with my mother for about a week and it was clear that she was declining. But after speaking with her doctors, it seemed like, you know, they were gonna take her to rehab and she was getting up and moving and walking, and so I thought she could be like this for years longer. I think that was some wishful thinking and maybe some delusion on my part in retrospect, but we don't know what we don't know. And there was a way in which I was actually really grateful that I wasn't there for my mother because I think what I felt in looking back at that time, that last week we had together was that she was trying to hold on for me and she was pretending almost, or acting almost, better than she actually felt. And I didn't want her to have to pretend or act. So in the end, I've come to a place of gladness and embrace for how it worked out in both cases. But it's interesting that both my parents left without me there. I think a final act of love, perhaps on both their parts.

[00:33:04] Sarah Cavanaugh: What does a peaceful exit mean to you?

[00:33:07] James Crews: I would love to say that it means all the loose ends of a life have been tied up, but I, I'm old enough now to know that that's probably not possible and incredibly unlikely. And so a peaceful exit for me means finally being okay with what is. The messiness, the beauty that has been given to me that I have maybe, hopefully been able to create for other people in my life. A peaceful exit does not mean that I feel like my work is finished. It means that I have done as much of the work I was brought here to do as possible, and it means the ability to surrender.