My friend Thug sent me the Late Fragment poem on the previous page several years ago. When I read it, my first thought was: “Oh wow! Oh wonderful! I want that read at my funeral.” My second thought was: “I don’t think the poem’s quite right. You can’t make out that all you want is to feel beloved – I want to LOVE as well as BE loved.”
And so I re-wrote it. My friend Fewings would not approve of me doing such a thing, but if I wanted it at my funeral, then it had to be right. So I amended it and filed it in the poetry folder on my computer.
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did
And what did you want?
To LOVE and be loved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
And there it sat, all ready for the big day.
But then slowly, over time, I began to feel uncomfortable. The words of the original kept coming back to me. I had a sneaky feeling that what Raymond Carver had written was more accurate, more honest and more profound than what I, in my fear, had edited.
When I amended the original, I was acting from the kind of reciprocity that is a necessary part of socialisation: “If I look after the children on Thursday, could you possibly take them on Friday?” I was staying at the level of good manners, of please and thank yous.
But the poem invites a response from a deeper place than that, from what I call the “soul sense”. The soul sense is what Clarissa Pinkola Estes is talking about when she describes that place where there is time and freedom to be, wander, wonder, write, sing, create and not be afraid.
When we are living in the soul sense, we know we belong. We are connected to all that is. We are held in the heart of God, beloved of the earth, a word, a breath, a song. We don’t have to go around scratching other people’s backs in order to earn our place. To me, that is the core of the second-half-of-life task – to know that, to really know it, in ways we could not have imagined when we were young.
So yes, please, friends, could one of you read Late Fragment – the honest version, the Raymond Carver version – at my funeral?
I hope it will be true by then…
It will be. It will be.
Next step: Love bade me welcome