April is National Poetry Month, and I’ve getting a poem a day emailed to me from Knopf Doubleday Publishing. The one for today is actually a letter written by Emily Dickinson to her cousins shortly after her mother died. It’s a lyrical pondering on the passing of a life. My favorite lines are: “There was no earthly parting. She slipped from our fingers like a flake gathered by the wind, and is now part of the drift called “the infinite.”

We don’t know where she is though so many tell us.”

As a writer and as a human, those lines make me swoon. After my own mother died, I was barely able to construct a coherent sentence, much less write something this lovely. My mom died nine years ago, but I still think of her often. She died well before my daughter came along, and I wish the two of them had had a chance to know each other. They would have been silly crazy for each other.

I know there’s a tendency to idealize people after they’re gone. I remember my mother as a fount of infinite patience and understanding and encouragement–qualities I often feel I lack. She had her bad days and her imperfections, although I wasn’t aware of them when I was small (who is?). I know myself and my shortcomings. It seems impossible to me that my own child will grow up and idealize me in the same way. But if when I’m gone my child writes something like this to one of her cousins, I’ll consider my parenting job well done.

To Louise and Frances Norcross, November, 1882

Dear Cousins,
I hoped to write you before, but mother’s dying almost stunned my spirit.
I have answered a few inquiries of love, but written little intuitively. She was scarcely the aunt you knew. The great mission of pain had been ratified—cultivated to tenderness by persistent sorrow, so that a larger mother died than had she died before. There was no earthly parting. She slipped from our fingers like a flake gathered by the wind, and is now part of the drift called “the infinite.”
We don’t know where she is, though so many tell us.
I believe we shall in some manner be cherished by our Maker—that the One who gave us this remarkable earth has the power to surprise that which He has caused. Beyond that all is silence…
Mother was very beautiful when she had died. Seraphs are solemn artists. The illumination that comes but once paused upon her features, and it seemed like hiding a picture to lay her in the grave; but the grass that received my father will suffice his guest, the one he asked at the altar to visit him all his life.
I cannot tell how Eternity seems. It sweeps around me like a sea…Thank you for remembering me. Remembrance—mighty word.
“Though gavest it to me from the foundation of the world.”

Lovingly,
Emily