Elegy (How Fragile is the Universe)

I have a long habit of being private with my emotions. Certainly some of the stories I write are provocative of feelings of sorrow, anger, and so on, but they are fiction--drawing on life but not about my life.

A few years ago I was watching, waiting, and helping as much as I could as a dear friend was dying. It was a quiet, protracted death which I could do nothing to prevent. I wrote a poem, the one whose title heads this post, and in my grief I was moved to record it and later to upload it to YouTube, but I kept it private, only inviting four friends to view it. That was in the fall of 2011, a few weeks before I learned of my own cancer.

Since then I have survived where friends have fallen, and I have had to look at death and loss and the perplexity of annihilation many times. Science has always been a part of how I make sense of life's deeper questions, so it isn't surprising that that is one place where I looked to find comfort around this loss.

The poem is not, I think, great art, and there are lines where you might smile when that was not the intended reaction. But I want to offer it openly now because whatever it is, it is an expression of my heartfelt reflections on matters that we all must face again and again in our lives, and there just may be others who find solace in these particular reflections, as I did.

So, with my great shyness still intact, I offer you my elegy. How fragile we are, indeed.

Casey