Love Letters to the Dead

“Well, I’m still working on it.” And then I added, “Actually, I’ve been working on it all year. I have a whole notebook full of them. I just wanted you to know.”


“Oh, well, I’m really happy to hear that, Laurel.” She lit up when she said it, but then she kept looking at me in that way that she does, like she was waiting for something. Like she wanted me to say something about May. So finally I asked, “When May was in your class, what was she like?”

“She seemed like a girl who was struggling to figure out who she was, kind of like you are. She was very bright, in both senses of the word. I thought that she had a lot to offer. I think that you do, too.” She paused, and then she said, “I know what it’s like to lose someone, Laurel.”

“You do?” I asked.

“Yes. I had a son—he passed.”

“Oh my god. I’m so sorry.” I was searching for something better to say. It made my chest crush in to think of that happening to Mrs. Buster. “When—when did it happen?”

“He was young,” Mrs. Buster said. “It was a car accident.”

I stared at her big blue eyes, and they didn’t seem like bug eyes anymore. They seemed sad. It’s like all of a sudden she’d turned from a teacher into a person. I guess when you lose someone, sometimes it feels like you are the only one. But I’m not.

“I’m sorry about your son,” I said again. “And I’m sorry that I wasn’t nicer this year. I think you are a really good teacher. I loved all of the poetry you gave us. And I am—just really sorry—I wish there were something good to say. I guess there aren’t really any words for it, huh?”

“There are a lot of human experiences that challenge the limits of our language,” she said. “That’s one of the reasons that we have poetry.” She smiled. “Here.” She fished something out of her desk. “I wanted to give you this. I’d copied it for you at the beginning of the year, since you seemed to like Bishop so much. But then—well, maybe you weren’t ready for it yet.”

I took the poem. “Thank you,” I said.

Then she said, “I’m proud of you. It’s not easy, and you’ve done a great job this year.” She didn’t have to be that nice to me, but she was.

I thanked her again for the poem. I was anxious to read it, so I found a bench and sat outside before I went to lunch. It was your poem called “The Armadillo.” I loved the poem so much, it stopped my heart. And I knew why Mrs. Buster had given it to me. It was about a certain kind of beauty we aspire to and how fragile it is. The poem starts out talking about fire balloons that people send off into the sky. The paper chambers flush and fill with light / that comes and goes, like hearts as they rise toward the stars. When the air is still, they steer between the kite sticks of the Southern Cross, but with a wind, they become dangerous. The end of the poem shows the tragedy that happens.

Last night another big one fell.

It splattered like an egg of fire

against the cliff behind the house.

The flame ran down. We saw the pair



of owls who nest there flying up

and up, their whirling black-and-white

stained bright pink underneath, until

they shrieked up out of sight.



The ancient owls’ nest must have burned.

Hastily, all alone,

a glistening armadillo left the scene,

rose-flecked, head down, tail down,



and then a baby rabbit jumped out,

short-eared, to our surprise.

So soft!—a handful of intangible ash

with fixed, ignited eyes.



Too pretty, dreamlike mimicry!

O falling fire and piercing cry

and panic, and a weak mailed fist

clenched ignorant against the sky!

I couldn’t stop thinking of it, our flushing hearts, trying to climb to the stars—how with the wrong wind, we can fall. I’m not sure if this is what you meant by the poem, but it made me think of how we all have both parts in us. I think maybe we all carry both the fire balloons and the soft animal creatures who could be hurt by them inside of us. It’s easy to feel like the bunny rabbit frozen in terror. And it’s easy to feel like one of the fire balloons, at the whim of the wind, either rising up out of sight or burning down. Blown one direction or another.

But there is a third thing in the poem—your voice. The one who saw it. The one who could stand and witness, the one who turned the pain and terror into this beautiful lyric. So maybe when we can say things, when we can write the words, when we can express how it feels, we aren’t so helpless.

I thought after reading your poem today that I might want to try to be a writer, too. Even though I don’t think I can ever write a poem as good as yours, it made me think that maybe I can do something with all of the feelings in me, even the ones that are sad and scared and angry. Maybe when we can tell the stories, however bad they are, we don’t belong to them anymore. They become ours. And maybe what growing up really means is knowing that you don’t have to just be a character, going whichever way the story says. It’s knowing that you could be the author instead.

Yours,

Laurel