Paradox and Poetry with Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer knows grief. Her dad and son died in the same year. Like her latest book, The Unfolding, if this interview were music, it would be in the key of grief. Rosemerry shares how her daily writing practice helped her navigate the days and weeks following her son's death. She also explains how we can hold opposite things that may both be true. We can let go of the tired stories we tell ourselves and find new metaphors that better serve us.

You can find Rosemerry's work and learn more about her poetry here: https://www.wordwoman.com/

Transcript:

arah Cavanaugh: [00:00:00] I am Sarah Cavanaugh, and this is Peaceful Exit, the podcast where we talk to creatives about life and death.

You know, I love poetry, and this conversation surprised me. It broke me down and then it put me back together, and it filled me with something like Hope, or at least the ability to hold both hope alongside grief. Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer is an amazing, prolific poet. She writes a poem every day, and I even asked her, do you really write a poem every day?

And indeed. She does. She loves metaphor and she talks about them in a really interesting way because some of our metaphors no longer serve us and we need to think of new metaphors, and she also invents words in a time that needs new vocabulary. Rosemerry's son and dad died in the same year, and much like her latest book, the Unfolding, [00:01:00] this interview is in the key of grief, as she says, and although there's so much grief here.

There is also so much praise.

Sarah Cavanaugh: Hi Rosemerry. Welcome to Peaceful Exit.

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer Hi, Sarah. Thank you. So nice to meet you.

Sarah Cavanaugh: What really struck me about your book was sort of this inquiry around acceptance and how we accept exits that aren't peaceful and you had one in your life and you lost your father and your son on the same year as I understand.

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: Yeah. My dad maybe did have, I suppose. It was certainly a much more peaceful exit than my son did, which is to say that my mom and my brother and I were all around him for days as he was dying, and how special that was. How lucky. [00:02:00] Beautiful to be present as as he moved from resistance to acceptance himself and to do it altogether.

Was such a gift and so, so different than the trauma of losing a child by suicide or as I prefer to say, he chose to take his own life and that was, as you say, that was not peaceful. Sarah and, and so it's been a very different kind of journey, I guess, for many reasons.

Sarah Cavanaugh: Yeah.

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: But that's certainly one of them.

Sarah Cavanaugh: So let's talk about your dad just for a minute. Was he home?

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: Yes. Although they had just moved to Georgia, so they had been there for three months. Mm-hmm. In fact, that's where we had been helping them move into their new home. When Finn took his life also in the same place into a [00:03:00] kind of a senior living.

And so he was not in their actual home, but in a building that was connected to their apartments, a skilled nursing center. So it was as close to home as possible, I suppose. He had wonderful care and I think felt surrounded by love.

Sarah Cavanaugh: Hmm.

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: I know he felt that. Do you have siblings? Just my younger brother, the two of us.

And there we were our, our small family connected in. In those moments, which, you know, it happens so rarely for the, the, the og right? The original for Watt's to, to be together, just us without extended family. And that was really special moving, precious.

Sarah Cavanaugh: And you were probably felt like you were able to say everything you wanted to say before he left?[00:04:00] 

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: Yes. I did feel like that we had. Days, many hours that I just got to sit with him. And some of that time he was very lucid and some of it he wasn't. And I could just be with him, which was, I think,

forgive me, although don't, I know you're really fine with me crying, but it occurs to me. Sarah that I talk a lot about my son's death, but not so much about my father. So it's interesting to feel how, I'm just noticing in, in real time that maybe there's some softening that happens the more that we talk about it, and I just can tell how.

How there's more rawness around this grief, which is [00:05:00] surprising to me. It makes sense. At the last moment, I went and grabbed a roll of toilet paper. Thank goodness.

Sarah Cavanaugh: It ma, it makes sense because so much attention has been paid to your son's death and you've written about your son's death. And we'll get to that.

We'll get to your book and your poems, um, but there's not as much in this book about your dad. Yeah. Yeah, let's talk for a minute about creating words. I'm shifting a little bit into your book. I feel like in this time as words are being censored, it takes courage to step into creating language, and I think that's our next call.

It's like, what are the words we're gonna create for the world we wanna see? And. Y you've done this and these four beautiful words around praise. Can you talk a little bit about the process for creating [00:06:00] words at this time when things seem to be, or some people seem to be wanting to take words out of our language.

How do we put words back into our language? Right.

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: And I wanna just start with, I think, part of your premise, which is how do we, how do we envision the world we most want to be part of? And how does language help us do that? I. And it's true. I think that sometimes words feel sorely lacking and maybe, maybe they always will be.

You know, I say the word tree and it's never going to be a tree. It's always a word. It's never the, it's never the tree itself, right? I write a poem about how much I love my daughter. It is never my daughter, right? It's just the poem pointing to the daughter. And yet there's something so powerful about that act of imagination, that act of creation that strengthens our bond to the world and strengthens our [00:07:00] clarity about what it is to be alive or invites us deeper into the mystery of what it is to be alive so we can steep there and more than anything, language.

Is connection. It is how we, we connect with the world around us. It's how we form our own ideas. It's how we reach to other people and communicate and receive it back. When we think of language in this way as a, as an infinite curiosity, as an infinite invitation to wonder. That's when languages, it's most helpful.

And I think when it's, it's most dangerous is when we have a word and we say, this is it, and this is the only, and it becomes a little prison instead of a a doorway. So I. Then to part two, I think of your question was about these words that I used in my new book, the Unfolding, and I created four new [00:08:00] words for praise, Velu, Soro, pan, Gloria, and some union.

Those are all words that are blends. Neologisms new words that try to touch the complexity of what it really is to be alive, which is to exist at the same time in a world that is full of both joy and sorrow, and to know that they're not mutually exclusive, to know that. Just because we're praising something doesn't mean that we like it all the time, or that we're not surrounded by things that we don't particularly like.

For instance, um, my idea with this word pan Gloria Pan, the Greek word for all Gloria, meaning. Glory and the idea that there is praise available to us in absolutely everything. Even the things where it's at first difficult to find it,

Sarah Cavanaugh: and I think this time calls for us for holding both. [00:09:00] We're all holding both.

Okay. A little context setting for our shift here to your poetry. We're gonna be reading poems mostly from your latest book, the Unfolding. But we're also gonna look at some poems from your daily writing practice, which I understand. You've been writing a daily poem since 2006, is that correct?

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: That's correct.

February of 2006. So that's a long time. It's really long time, isn't it?

Sarah Cavanaugh: And

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: is it actually so many s poems? Is it

Sarah Cavanaugh: actually

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: every day, or do you ever miss a day? Oh, friend. I don't ever miss a day except there, there are two exceptions. I, I did, I didn't write for, I don't know, a couple of months after my second child was born, after Vivian was born.

And then I didn't write for 49 days, seven weeks after fin died.

Sarah Cavanaugh: Let's talk about Finn for a minute. Can you give us a little [00:10:00] context of, as people are reading your poems, 'cause I want them to run out and buy your book, give us a little context about what happened.

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: So Finn was, he brought an enormous amount of light.

To the world. He had just this kind of sparkling personality. He was ridiculously talented in almost, I mean, he sounds unreal sometimes when I talk about him, how he, you know, learned how to do back flips on his skis and built his own computers with all kinds of. Colors in them, so they'd also be aesthetically pleasing.

And he, you know, won the fencing tournament and he won the chess tournament and he won the invention fair. And I, he just had this kind of brilliant mind and laughed a lot, but he also, I think, brought all that light because he was. Almost [00:11:00] always in pain. And that was something that he began to exhibit.

The moment he came out into the world, he cried for that whole first year. And you know, it took him to every kind of doctor, chiropractor, naturopath, just everything we could think of. And people couldn't find out what was wrong, why he was clearly hurting. His first word was shadow. Like not mama data cat, it was shadow, a two syllable word about an abstract thing.

It was never easy to be Finn drummer in the world somehow. And his first time that he began talking about wanting to take his life was in sixth grade, and we immediately got him lots of help with therapists and kind of a. Life coach and acupuncture, and that's when we began the fencing [00:12:00] lessons. I mean, we changed his school and anything we could do to address him and help him find a way to be here.

So it wasn't a surprise, you know, it wasn't out of nowhere when he chose to take his life in August of 2021 and. He had been really hurting. He also, the day before he took his life, he had just been accepted into a new school who had just told him over and over how much they wanted him and how grateful they were that he was going to be coming, and they were showering him with praise.

I think it helps me, Sarah, to know that he knew. That he had options here. It wasn't like every door had closed for him. You know, it helps me to know in a way that there's no doubt in [00:13:00] my mind that that boy knew how loved he was, and still he was somehow suffering so much that this is the choice that he made.

So when we were in Georgia. Helping my mom and dad move into their new home. My father's guns were not locked and they were, you know, being moved. So this is how he, he found a way to do it.

Sarah Cavanaugh: What's coming up for me is your ability to speak about it and only it feels in all of your writing and all of your metabolizing of what is.

Unspeakable, are you able to sit here and share with me how much do you feel like your, your poetry, your writing has helped you through this?

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: Oh, Sarah. Well, [00:14:00] enormously there's, there's no doubt about that, but not just after the fact. Before the fact too, which is to say that through all those difficult years I had writing as a way to meet what it was like to be a parent of a child who was brilliant and hurting, and I had a daily practice already in place for what, at that point, 15 years of showing up to wonder what's here.

I. So that I think that the, the real gift of that practice, though, I would've never said so at the time, and I only can say so now in retrospect, is that when things fell apart, I still had a habit of showing up. I. So that even when I wasn't writing poems for those first seven weeks after he died, I still had this [00:15:00] impulse to be present.

I still had this longing to feel, I remember people saying, you don't actually have to feel it all. And I wanted to, more than anything. I wanted to feel it. I wanted to feel the, the deepest ache of it. When I did begin writing poems again, I do believe, Sarah, that that getting to explore my relationship to him and how the poems help that relationship continue to grow because I'm writing him letters about this is what's happening.

This is what it's like to love you now. This is what it's like in the world now that you're not here physically, but you're still here. In every way. Right. You're, you're still here.

Sarah Cavanaugh: I love what you say about how you love him now, and I was wondering, you clearly have a way with words, you're a professional poet, but [00:16:00] what about the rest of us?

What if we don't have a daily writing practice?

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: You don't need to be a poet or even like poems to allow writing to be a companion for you as you grieve. One of the greatest gifts that a poem can offer us is that it embraces paradox. My invitation to myself is always to write something true. It doesn't have to be good, it just has to be true, and that I just let a, a poem be made up of lines, one after another.

What's the next true thing? What's the next true thing? And if I can write something true. Then the next invitation is to write the exact opposite and see if it's also true. If, if you have a story that you're telling yourself, I should have done this, then allow yourself to write that, because of course that's how [00:17:00] you're feeling.

And then allow yourself to write the exact opposite. I should not have. Fill in the blank and see if there's any way that that could also be true. And in this way of seeing, just inviting up this paradox, it helps to open us up again. There's that word opening, and actually I have a poem that that exemplifies this, that I'd love to share with you.

The poem is called Two Truths. He is Dead. Never again to pull on the fencing mask, moonwalk to his bedroom or snuggle on the couch, not dancing on the stage. He is dead. Not spinning. The gator through the field, not graphing equations for pleasure. Is he dead? Asks the heart. No. He lives on forever in the scent of [00:18:00] lemon.

The cloudy ice on the pond in the buds of the lilac tree. In the song On My Breath, he lives in blue sky, in Comet and Field. He lives in ink and in spaces between. He is dead. I held his underbreathing body in my arms since that day. He has never left me. He is alive. Forever.

So we take these phrases. He's dead. Is he dead? No, he's alive forever. Are they both true? They're both true. Oh, Sarah, and then I had this profound experience. Actually, I wrote a poem about this too. That poem and this one too [00:19:00] are both from all the honey. Okay, so this poem is called The Invitation. Two nights after he Died All Night, I heard the same one line story on repeat.

I am the woman whose son took his life. The words felt full of self-pity, filled me with hopelessness, doom, and then a voice came, a woman's voice just before dawn, and it gave me a new shade of truth. I am the woman who learns how to love him. Now that he's gone, it did not change the facts, but it changed everything about how I met the facts.[00:20:00]

Over a hundred days later, over three years later, I am still learning what it means to love him. How love is an ocean, a wildfire, a crumb? How commitment to love changes me, changes everyone invites us to bring our best. Love is wine, is trampoline is an infinite song with a chorus in which I am sung. I am the woman who learns how to love him.

Now that he's gone, may I always be learning how to love. Like a cave, like a rough, like ad hawk, like a sun.

Sarah Cavanaugh: So visiting the place where your son died, you wrote two poems. One is in the new book. How do you feel about reading both of them or just the one in the new book? [00:21:00] 

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: The, yeah, both of them. I'm, I'm happy to read them both. The first time that I went back, Sarah was. When, when my father, I didn't yet know he was dying, but it was three months after Finn died.

My dad was in skilled nursing. It was my mother's 75th birthday. So I was determined to go back and neither my husband nor my daughter felt like they were capable of that, which of course I understood. I knew that it was asking a lot of me to go back to that place, which the only, the only experience I have with that place was helping them move in and then this enormous loss.

So it, there was no happy memories to, to help soften what that place represented to me. And then. Just in the last, um, few [00:22:00] months, it was my mother's birthday again, and I told my daughter that I was going to be going, and she said, could I come with you this time? And I said, yeah, of course. And I'll do everything I can to keep you safe as you do that.

When we went back for Vivian, what she most needed was to not go back to that room. Where he had died. And by the way, she was the one who had found him there. And I understood that completely and knew why it was important for her, even if she stayed in that same little apartment, to not go back to that space.

The opposite is true for me. That, that for me, I need to go sit in that same exact spot on the floor where he died and, and be there so. I think first I'll, I'll read the poem. That's about my first time going back to that space, and then I'll read the [00:23:00] poem about going back after that With Vivian,

I didn't think I could do it, but I found myself rigid in the room where my son took his life. And I sat on the floor in the doorway where he had last sat, where his blood had pooled and the air had briefly smelled of burning. I sat there beneath the wall where the bullet had made its narrow hole. I sat there with my coil of sorrow.

I didn't want to meet it. I desperately wanted to meet it. I wanted to give sorrow space. I wanted to crawl inside it. I wanted to be anywhere but there on the dark wood floor in the night, dark room, [00:24:00] and I wanted to be holy. Completely obliterating there. Fear ridden, ferocious. I meant it all Felt the current pushing through.

Acceptance is a filament that takes our resistance and makes it bright, makes it luminous enough that we might see ourselves exactly as we are. I did not find my son in that doorway. Perhaps I had hoped I would, but I saw the light that came with me. I softened. Into that light. I think in that poem, you can really hear that interplay of those opposites, like we were talking about before with the paradox.

I didn't want to meet it. I desperately wanted to meet it. I wanted to give it space. I wanted to crawl inside it. I wanted to be anywhere but there, and I wanted to be completely there. [00:25:00] And, um, both of those equally true as I was experiencing that for the first time. And then three years later, going back to that same spot.

So then this poem, visiting the place where my son died. Please, I tell myself, don't take this lightly. Don't walk into this room as if it's just another room. Come with reverence, please. I say to myself, all of Myselves, please don't stride it across this wooden floor as if it isn't the last place. Your son brought the world into his lungs, the last place he loved and ached and wept.

So I sit and breathe until I feel it rise in my chest. How sacred it is this place. I sit here until I feel my [00:26:00] attention split. I notice the urge to leave. I choose again to stay, and the choice baptizes me, please. I say to myself, please slow to the pace of stone. Nothing to do but be here. And the crying comes.

And goes and comes again and goes, I close my eyes and let the shadows grow. Then open my eyes and look beyond the window to the sky, the cliffs, the lake, please. I tell myself, do not refuse to see it is beautiful. What is the part of me that dies? What is the part that rises slow and new to walk again into the [00:27:00] world?

Sarah Cavanaugh: As you were reading, I could see you create a really beautiful vision around the sacredness of those spaces where people die honoring that space, and it's terrifying as well. Oh yeah.

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: All those feelings, all those big, horrible feelings. Yeah, it's terrifying.

Sarah Cavanaugh: I've talked to other parents who've lost children and.

You put words to experiences that are very hard to articulate. Impossible. Really? That's why poetry feels like the exact right art form, because poetry doesn't pretend to articulate things. And I'd love for you to read. They asked if we had more children

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: after I told them about our two daughters. They asked if we had more children.[00:28:00] 

There's no easy way to say it. I told them our son died. They were sitting across from us, our new neighbors afternoon, sun streaming into the room with low spring gold. Their grandson sat on the floor a teaspoon, the only toy I had for him. He mouthed it with quiet joy. Was it an accident? She asked. He chose to take his own life.

I said, the words hung in the air like dust that sparkles then seems to disappear. What I did not say, once we sat on this couch and read books, watched Peter Pan built pirate forts with pillows. Search for Waldo and Snuggled when it rained. [00:29:00] Once he too chewed on my teaspoons before he built computers and took AP statistics and helped me buy a Ford, they murmured.

I'm sorry, because that is what people say when there is nothing else to say. When the talk soon turned to bonfires and building permits. I did not mind. It was enough to have acknowledged he was here,

what I did not say, but somehow said Just because he's dead doesn't mean he's gone.

We have three children, two daughters and a son. Oh friend. You know there's the ambush, right, where you just couldn't possibly know you're [00:30:00] about to start weeping and the ambush, and I've become such good friends,

Sarah Cavanaugh: which is why you have an entire roll of toilet paper with you.

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: That is why I have an entire roll of toilet paper.

I also have realized. Sarah that I don't mind crying at all. In fact, I think there was a time when I thought, if I'm gonna cry, then I'm not going to read that poem. If I'm gonna cry, then I'm not gonna talk about this. Then I realized that those were the things that I most deeply wanted to talk about, and they mattered the most.

And I thought, okay, then, then I'm gonna say them.

Sarah Cavanaugh: I'm gonna say them, and I'm gonna bring my toilet paper.

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: Then I'm bringing my toilet paper and I'm gonna cry, and I'm going to say these things that are the most important things to say. I'm, I'm not gonna let tears stop me from, from being as real as possible.

Sarah Cavanaugh: Before you read [00:31:00] this poem, grace, will you share the context, uh, of the night? It was about,

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: so there we were in Georgia. It was late at night and I love walking late at night and I always ask my kids if they would like to go walk with me, and they always said no. And this particular night I said, Hey Finn, you wanna come for a walk with me?

And he said, yes. I was overjoyed. And so we were just walking around this, these dark streets in this very rural part of Rome, Georgia. Oh my goodness. He was. So happy and easy and giddy, and we were having such a wonderful time talking about ridiculous things, and I was just so in love with that moment.

And the poem I wrote that night was about that grace, what a loss it would be to not have been born. I [00:32:00] would've missed a Thursday night such as this, in which my son and I walk the dark streets in Georgia and watch the lightning, transform the sky into pink flares and smell some sweet unnameable flower and talk about dodge chargers and knees and roaches.

I swear it has all been worth it every second of 51 years for this hour. In which there are no bells, no shoulds, no other tugs except to take the next step down the center line while in the distance wraps another clap of thunder. It strikes me, Sarah, the gift I gave myself that I didn't know I was giving myself, writing this poem.

About just how wonderful it was to be with him just [00:33:00] before he was no longer here. I remember just how true it was to that feeling of it's all been worth it just for this hour, everything. Everything in my whole life has been worth it. Just to have that hour, not that it was perfect, there was all this other stuff, and yet what was perfect was that we were so in it together, that we were so present in it, in together.

There was a sense too, that I'd wrote about in that poem of something ominous coming. And I could feel that, of course, in him, he was so deeply unsettled and, and there was so much difficulty happening in his life right then. So much that was hurting him. That was also a part of that moment, you know, so that it was, it was all of it, and just being so present with it together.

That was the gift. That was the gift. Still is.

Sarah Cavanaugh: Mm. And it reminds all of us [00:34:00] to hold those moments, not that they're perfect, but that they are what they are when we're together in this physical form, you know? Yep. What does a peaceful exit mean to you?

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: I guess it would be

saying yes to the world as it is. Being open to what's happening instead of in resistance, which is saying yes to mortality, yes to the gift of life, which is, its opposite but necessary corollary,

um, yes to all the love, and yes to the longing to not say goodbye. Yes. To being here and yes to the mystery of what's. Also hear that we have no idea yet. Yeah, I suppose a peaceful exit is flooded with [00:35:00] that. Yes.

Sarah Cavanaugh: Well, it's such a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you so much for your time.

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: Thank you, Sarah.

Sarah Cavanaugh: Thank you for listening to Peaceful Exit. I'm your host, Sarah Cavanaugh. You can find me on Instagram at @APeacefulExit. And you can learn more about this podcast at peacefulexit.net. Our senior producer and editor is Katy Klein. Our sound engineer is Shawn Simmons. Additional support from Cindy Gal and Ciara Austin.

Original music provided by Ricardo Russell, with additional music and sounds from Blue Dot Sessions. If you'd like to support our show, please follow us on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, rate and review us wherever you listen. It really does make a difference. And as always, thank you so much for listening.