Natasha Pepperl on “If You Live Long Enough”

As we all know, the pandemic has shed a new emphasis on grief as it becomes a more prominent part of our shared experience and vernacular.

These past few years have also brought non-COVID related suffering into my life as I’ve lost family members and also become a foster mom and seen the heavy griefs kids in foster care carry. I’ve turned to poetry as a way to find beauty in some truly terrible circumstances.

Brenna Twohy’s “I Guess I’ll Tell It Like This” was the inspiration behind my poem “If You Live Long Enough.” In her poem, Brenna likens women who have experienced trauma to sand dollars and carries the metaphor throughout the entire poem in a way that is lovely without discounting the realities of abuse.

In my own grief journey, I have found the most solace in people who are able to sit with me in the tragedy without flinching or trying to make sense where there is none — and who can hold space for some light and levity at the same time. This is no easy task, but nature shows us plenty of examples.

Last summer I hiked through Rocky Mountain National Park and saw the devastation of Colorado’s East Troublesome Wildfire, the most rapid-fire expansion in state history. I was in awe at the breath and depth of such destruction to a once lively forest. It was eerie enough that it seemed a fitting metaphor for the aftermath of a huge grief, where a once familiar landscape suddenly looks otherworldly.

I sought to make the poem forceful and punchy like a wildfire whipping through mountain pine. For levity, I also looked to these burned trees with roots “Sky-side / for the first time and nothing left / to do but laugh through another morning.” Just as with the unpredictability of grief and wildfires, many lines in this poem change meaning upon reading the following line.

And grief permeates everywhere and everyone, from a hiker squinting to see the miles-long destruction in the mountains to a city park with an unhoused man raw in his sorrow, to two friends in a garden who grab greedily at the beauty around them.

But in the connectivity of grief, we also see its isolating factor: how no grief can be fully shared with another, even among close friends or a married couple experiencing the same losses.

I find the most satisfying part of writing poetry is when a poem teaches me something new. In this poem, I learned that I am stronger than I once was. That I can grasp joy more fully now than ever before. That everyday I’m learning to more completely let go of what has already been taken.

And can’t we all say similar things about having survived thus far?