What Matters Most: Poems About Love, Loss, & Trauma

Addendum To the Introduction

This book does have a number of love poems. I wrote poems inspired by the love I felt toward some very special people in my life. However, it is a tragic truth that my life has been one that has featured tragedy and loss. What are we when we join with another and become a couple and then we lose the object of our love? When someone dies so very, very young.

In reality, I know that it wouldn't matter how long we lived as husband and wife. Whether the loss came after a week spent together or fifty years of marriage the pain of losing the one we love is exquisite and singular in quality.

I chose the title "What Really Matters" from some words that I started to write to Lynn. I was trying to deal with a whole host of major stressors all at once and I had lost everything in 2000. I had been weak emotionally and psychologically when Lynn became ill. I wasn't in my right mind. I was overwhelmed. 

As I was saying there were other major stressors occurring, colliding all at once beginning in late July of 2000. I experienced the loss of my home, my job, and my career. I used the phrase in a letter to Lynn that all that was somehow less impactful than losing her. Now this book is a statement of that realization. 

I found that working as a therapist, a clinical social worker is profoundly rewarding. It brought me such joy. I cared deeply about my clients but I wasn't in love with them. 

I think of the words by Don Henley in his song "New York Minute" that go:

Lying here in the darkness
You hear the sirens wail
Somebody going to emergency
Somebody's going to jail
If you find somebody to love in this world
You better hang on tooth and nail
The wolf is always at the door

In a New York Minute
Everything can change
In a New York Minute
Things can get a little strange
In a New York Minute
Everything can change
In a New York Minute

And in these days
When darkness falls early
And people rush home
To the ones they love
You better take a fool's advice
And take care of your own
'Cause one day they're here;
Next day they're gone

This is what I know.

Losing my career, my freedom, my dreams, and my home was so painful and unbearable. Losing the object of my love may be more painful than anything. It was the most depressing event in my life. Why because the most joyful moment in my life was when I saw those tears of joy in Lynn's eyes when I gave her our engagement ring.

I can't explain that any better than to say that this is a truth that I know because it's what I have felt. It's a feeling and an experience. Logic and rationality don't make life meaningful.

This is hard for me to square with my rational mind that often rejects faith and religion. I'll back to that in a moment.

The first person I ever loved was named Celta Camille Head and she died tragically at the end of the year 1990 when she was just 32 years old. Then I found love in Lynn Denise Krupey. We had the chance to live together as husband and wife for many years in the 90s.

At the age of 33, she was fighting for her life. She was born with Cystic Fibrosis which causes excess mucus to build up in the body and this is a breeding ground for infections. These infections cause scarring in the lungs and they affected her breathing. This left her gasping for air with very low oxygen saturation levels. This and other factors pointed to the unimaginable reality that she might die at any time.

So, in addition to poems about love, I have also included poems about loss and poems about feeling lost... with no sense of who I am, where I am going, and where I might find a home. I was lost.

Some of the poems in the original version of this book (the version Thomas reviewed in creating his introduction) reflected my Christian, religious point of view with regard to those things that are of ultimate and everlasting value.

The demons that Thomas referenced could represent many things. The nightmares are fading but I do remember what happened. It was worse than what I could have imagined. I was held prisoner by the state after being brutally victimized. That was extremely traumatic, and I had to spend over a year in therapy addressing that experience and so many other experiences when I was literally homeless. I was homeless for much of the time period between late 2000 and the year 2006.

I was told long ago by a poetry mentor of mine to avoid writing about love because it is hard to say anything new about love. So, here I am trying to explain something important while avoiding the use of clichés.

I guess the point is this. There are so many things that are important to me, so many things that bring me joy, but none of that compares to the value of love and the relationships that are or were most dear to me. Maybe that isn't the case for everyone.

This book is somewhat philosophical in that I am seeking to make sense of life.

I have decided to include at the end the poems that were in the original version of this book which reflected my point of view as a Christian believer. At one time, like so many others, I turned to God for support and ultimate meaning.

I turned to God for comfort after the loss of Celta. A Catholic Nun taught us a unique form of prayer that included relaxation exercises and then guided visualization. I suppose I needed to visualize being held and nurtured during a time of great distress and grief.

So much of what inspires a poet or writer cannot be proven. Feelings just are and love is. That being said, I think that I want something more than stories in the Bible to be proof to me that there is a God and that the supernatural actually exists.

From the standpoint of a believer, it seems so cruel to show someone the pleasures and joys of love and then to take that all away... for death to come into the life of a couple when they are so young is hard to make sense of as a believer... if I was a believer.

Doesn't anything last?

I suppose it's poignant the way I heard in one of the last Star Wars movies that "no one really dies." Okay, so those that we love will become a part of us forever.

That can be uplifting. Think about it. Instead of thinking about our friends and loved ones leaving us, we imagine that they are always a part of us. If we have memories and know what made us who we are now, we always have others that live within us...

Maybe it's like the way the words of a great writer live forever.