Ahead of Time: On poetry and mourning

Ninety-three days before she died, my sister sent me a message. Five and a half years earlier, Bita had been diagnosed with stage four intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma, a rare and deadly form of cancer. She was forty-three. There was a thirteen-centimeter mass—roughly the size of a grapefruit—in her liver. When the radiologist friend who’d helped get Bita into Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center saw me in the hospital corridor after her diagnosis, he burst into tears.

Bita had been in treatment ever since; I had been beside her for nearly every appointment. They tended to be on Mondays: I’d take the train from Philadelphia to New York City and meet her in the waiting area of her oncologist’s clinic. Inside, I’d watch and listen and take notes. I discovered I had a talent for explaining to the doctor what my sister wanted to know but was reluctant to ask directly, and for explaining to Bita the implications of what he’d actually said rather than what she was afraid she’d heard. I’m a poetry critic and a teacher. What I did in the oncologist’s clinic was not so different from what I do in the classroom or on the page. I listened and redescribed what I’d heard; I connected threads, or tried to.

Now it was the sixth summer after her diagnosis, and I had brought my six-year-old daughter from our home in Pennsylvania to California to visit my parents and stay for a few weeks in the house where Bita and I had grown up. Bita had herself been six when we’d moved to California from Iran; I had been one. For the first few years we shared a bedroom. I don’t remember much of it. The shag carpet in our room was red, faded from the sunlight that poured through the sliding glass doors each afternoon. At night, our mother would tuck us in. In my earliest memories, we’re each in our own bed, lying in the dark. I am refusing to speak Farsi. Each night, before she lets her leave the room, Bita makes our mother promise that everything is going to be okay.

That summer morning, out in California with my daughter, I’d pulled an edition of Langston Hughes’s poems from a shelf in that same childhood bedroom (eventually it became mine alone) and idly flipped through its pages. I landed here:

Island

Wave of sorrow,Do not drown me now:

I see the islandStill ahead somehow.

I see the islandAnd its sands are fair:

Wave of sorrow,Take me there.

Time washing up on my shore: a poem from the previous century, a book from another life. I snapped a picture with my phone and, in what had become a daily ritual, posted the poem to Twitter. Bita was on Twitter, too, but almost always passively; she rarely posted.

This time, however, there was a reply from her, two hours later: “Love you baradar–I’ll meet you there.”

She sent that message from a hospital bed. Her white blood cell count was off, and her doctors were concerned that she was exhibiting early signs of pneumonia. Where, I wanted to know, was this “there,” and when would our meeting take place? The poem asks for deliverance—it is a prayer for a utopian future—but its terms are strange. Its present is full of pain, “sorrow” that threatens to fill the same airways that allow for breath. In that sense the poem’s continuation, line by line, stanza by stanza, is evidence of its prayer having been answered.

“Many a green isle,” Shelley once wrote, in lines that, an ocean away and a century later, Hughes might have recalled, “needs must be / In the deep wide sea of Misery.” Without dry land, Shelley implies, one could not go on suffering; relief must exist, in his weird logic, because it is a necessary precondition for the continued presence of the suffering speaker. For Hughes the logic is...