Fragments of Loss by Annie Smith

Fragments of Loss is a slim book of jottings and poems culled from a journal the author discovered while moving to Guanajuato, Mexico.  This journal was one she had kept during the time immediately preceding her first husband’s death. Out of curiosity she took it from the moving box and, after re reading it, transcribed it into the computer.

The resulting book is exactly what it says: fragments. A condensed pressing of feelings recorded at the time they were experienced.  Small portraits of emotion. Immediate, raw, intense in much the same way that drawings are to the more removed paintings that follow.

Like birth, the other bookend of life, death can be moving. Sacred even.

Fragments of Loss shows one unique story and lets you walk in the author’s shoes for awhile, share in her field notes so to speak, and notice what she chooses to notice. These pages are a tribute to the ordinary everydayness of both the grief that follows but also precedes a death. It is about resilience and the human spirit.

 

He is going to die

soon
nothing can be done
I am walking to the elevator
in Santa Monica
holding my husband’s hand

we have just been told
he has stage four lung cancer

I want a cigarette so badly
it’s all I can think about
like when I gave birth
to a full-term baby boy
dead

in the recovery room
I begged for a cigarette
to hell with the oxygen
that might explode

I had given up smoking years ago

yet sometimes when the
situation you are in
can’t hold safe space for you,
a drag on anything
that comes back at you with smoke
is the only thing in the world
that makes sense

there had been other bundles of bad news
over the last ten years but this one was saying “end game” and we both knew it