On Writing My Poetic Memoir
Don’t believe what Robert Frost said about “The Road Not Taken.” Fifty years ago, I turned at a fork in the road, having completed my college degree with a major in English and an emphasis on poetry. I chose the path that led me to an academic career in information science and technology, and focusing writing energy on scholarly papers and books about my research. I wrote poetry on the side and took a couple of workshops. But in all those years I only published one poem – about my family’s ritual of making doughnuts to give out on Halloween. Fast forward to 2023 and the publication of my first book of poetry. It is fitting that this first volume is about family, and contains the poem I published in the 1990s!
In 2018 I returned to that fork in the road. I was newly retired and had moved back to my hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio. In early January of that year my mother – who was living in Columbia, Missouri in the home of my sister, Kate, since 2011 – declined significantly. She was 102 so this wasn’t unexpected. Kate and her family were taking a much-deserved family vacation and I volunteered to be the daughter who would stay with our mother for the week that they were gone. I grew up as the middle child in a family of seven girls (my oldest sister, Charlene, passed away in 1998), in the 1950s and 1960s.
Our father passed away in 1979. For the next 30 years our mother took turns staying with her daughters, who were spread across the country, until she could no longer travel and ended up permanently with Kate. The rest of us, then, took turns traveling to her, sharing caregiving duties with one of us going out to Missouri each weekend. But in January 2018, my one-week stay became six as Mom was admitted into at-home hospice and we witnessed her steady decline. By the time I left in mid-February she was no longer able to get out of bed. It was during this period that I was inspired to “someday” write a poetic memoir about this experience. And I decided I would title it Ordinary Time.
“Someday” came sooner than I had expected. During 2018 and 2019 I became involved in the local poetry community, and began to write poems about my mother’s decline and her daughters’ group caregiving. My mother passed away on January 1, 2020, after a week of Christmas celebrating with all her children and grandchildren. She had lived two years in hospice, surprising everyone, and nearly all of this time confined to bed. I received the gift of being with her when she finally passed away a couple of months into her 104th year. It was in the aftermath of her death and during the Covid-19 lockdown that the majority of poems in Ordinary Time came into existence. I grew up in a largely German-Irish-Catholic culture.
My sisters and I were all educated in Catholic schools. My mother was observant and deeply religious, in the Catholic social justice sense. So, it was impossible for me to write poetry about her and our lives without adding religious imagery to themes of food and family. As I witnessed Mother’s decline in winter 2018 I was struck by the irony that it was occurring during that period in the Roman Catholic liturgical calendar, called “Ordinary Time,” which begins the day after the Epiphany and ends on the day before Ash Wednesday. But, of course, what we were living through was anything but ordinary!
As a brief lockdown in March 2020 became weeks and then months, another theme entered the poetry I was writing: resilience. I began to see the connection between the life I was living and the one Mother lived for two years. As I sat confined in my apartment, I developed an even greater appreciation for the resilience and strength it took for my mother to endure for two years, being mentally fully alert, yet being physically confined to her bed. I began to imagine what she was thinking and feeling. This led me to include her voice (as I imagine it) in some of the poems.
During 2020 and early 2021, before the vaccine gave us more mobility, I participated in virtual open mics to gauge audience reaction to my poems. I sent individual poems out for publication. I also took two virtual classes with Cincinnati Poet Laureate Emeritus, Pauletta Hansel. By the time I was fully vaccinated, I had a finished product: a poetic story about physical and spiritual nurturing, and resilience. It is told through the lens of a mother-daughter relationship and the shift in caregiving at the end of my mother’s life. The poems in this collection take you on a journey through three time periods.
The early poems are set in the two years preceding my mother’s death when she was in hospice and confined to bed. The middle group of poems provides the back story about my mother as caregiver. The final group of poems is set when she finally passes away. While I tell this story through poetry, it is one that I think resonates across genres. In November 2022 Ordinary Time was accepted by Kelsay Books for publication. (https://kelsaybooks.com/collections/all/eileen-trauth).
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Eileen Trauth is an author, poet and playwright. She was a college professor for many years and published ten nonfiction books and an award-winning play. Her poetry appears in print and online publications including Common Threads, Loch Raven Review, The Orchards Poetry Journal, Persimmon Tree and Sheila-Na-Gig, and in anthologies including Conversations, For A Better World, InsideOut: An Affirming Epiphany and Within Us. Her chapbook, Ordinary Time is published by Kelsay Books (2023). She is a member of the Greater Cincinnati Writers League, Ohio Poetry Association, Fourth Friday Poetry International Group, and Sisters in Crime. She lives in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Category: On Writing
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