“Harold and Maude” taught me to not fear dying
“She was a terrible child.” This is how my dad described me to my wife at the time, sitting across from us at a Monical’s Pizza during what would be our last meal together. In between that and bites of food that was our favorite — hardly able to enjoy it amidst the tension — he pulled something else from his memory bank to share about me, neither of us knowing that it would be one of our final moments face to face before he died of a heart attack, alone on his bathroom floor, just a few months later. “She was always off doing something weird, like writing poetry in a cemetery.” An unfair appraisal. What he didn’t understand, nor tried to understand, is that I didn’t frequent cemeteries looking for death. I went to them to look for the pretty weeds and wildflowers that grew in between the rows of people who lived lives long and short before me. And, most times, I was writing poems about the sun that shone down in …
