Farewell, My Dear Friend

This past month has been very difficult. My husband and I lost our sweet old baby girl cat, Holly Golightly, on July 28. She was very old and I wrote about her for this blog just last year. She went very quickly (as the vet had once predicted) and naturally but still, you’re never really ever ready to say goodbye. You want just one more cuddle, one more purr.

Seventeen years of an established and familiar routine, daily care, and infinite love are gone forever. While we are very sad, we are also grateful that she was not ill so we did not have the angst of having to make a painful decision; in her own tough and sassy way, Holly Golightly made it for us.

Above all else, I learned that we are not alone in our sorrow and have found great solace with fellow pet lovers. The library is helping us out–as always–with this wonderful little book we have found to be invaluable for comfort and peace to any pet owner.

Goodbye, Friend: Healing Wisdom for Anyone Who Has Ever Lost a Pet

by Gary Kowalski

Though penned by a Unitarian clergyman, this beautifully written book does not have an overtly religious tone. What it does offer is comfort and calm in a reassuring and understanding voice that I desperately needed to hear upon the passing of my beloved animal companion. He encourages ways to remember and memorialize your pet, acknowledgment of the cycles of life, and the very real pain we feel when a pet, a member of our family, dies.

Be sure to also check out next week’s display in the Reference Room on the second floor of Main Library for more resources on this topic.

~Maria A., still grieving but slowly healing

We Are Family

In Pittsburgh, we are truly family. When members of a family lose one of their own, they grieve. When they lose several, they hurt, more deeply than can be imagined.

For the moment, let’s put aside money and politics and contention and think about loss and what it means in our lives. Let us feel loss. The loss for our neighbors. The loss for our friends. The loss for our colleagues.

The loss for our community.

Hazelwood, Beechview, West End, Lawrenceville, and Carrick and Knoxville.

As it stands now, the first four of these branches of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh will close and the next two will combine into a new, yet to-be-built facility.

Many of us associated with the library, customers, staff and friends, are going through the various stages of loss that are so well known to all. Right now, we are in the very early stages.

Among poets, Emily Dickinson is, perhaps, the master of loss. Here is her evocative rendition of what we, as a community of neighbors, friends, and colleagues, are experiencing right now:

After great pain a formal feeling comes –
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs –
The stiff Heart questions–was it He, that bore,
And Yesterday, or Centuries before?

The Feet, mechanical, go round –
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought –
A Wooden way
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone –

This is the Hour of Lead –
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons recollect the Snow –
First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –

– Don

free lecture on grief

This is my family’s first holiday season without my grandfather, and we’re all feeling his absence. People have different ways of dealing with the loss of someone close, and sometimes we may ask ourselves, ‘How long will I feel this way?’ or ‘Is this normal?’ Grief is a natural response to death, as we work through the myriad of feelings that come up as the grieving process takes its course. Sometimes, however, one can get stuck on that course, and it becomes difficult to move on.

Tomorrow, December 3rd, Dr. Allan Zuckoff, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh, will be at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh – Main to speak about grief, how it works, when it doesn’t, and to clarify commonly held misconceptions about it. The lecture will be held in the International Poetry Room on the 2nd Floor at 6pm, and there will be free screenings for Complicated Grief and Depression. It is part of the Mental Health & Wellness Lecture Series, a monthly event sponsored by the University of Pittsburgh Clinical and Translational Science Institute.

If you or someone you know wants to learn more about the grieving process, please come and take advantage of this free program. You may also be interested in this list of fiction, memoirs and self help books, as well.

• Comfort: A Journey Through Grief, by Ann Hood
• Good Grief: A Novel, by Lolly Winston
• Grief, by Andrew Holleran
• I Wasn’t Ready to Say Goodbye: Surviving, Coping, and Healing After the Sudden Death of a Loved One, by Brook Noel and Pamela D. Blair
• On Grief and Grieving: Finding the Meaning of Grief Through the Five Stages of Loss, by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and David Kessler
• When Bad Things Happen to Good People, by Harold Kushner
• The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion

-Kaarin

Emily Dickinson: 3 Poems Discussion Group

 

As mentioned in a previous post,  Main Library will be hosting a brand new discussion group beginning Thursday evening, October 9th, entitled 3 Poems By ….  Each session of the 3 Poems By … Poetry Discussion Group will concentrate on three representative works of a particular poet.  There will be a brief intro by one of the two moderators (Renée or Don), followed by a guided discussion of the 3 poems under consideration.  

Think of it as a book discussion group without the (whole) book, just 3 poems.

Up first is Emily Dickinson who, along with Walt Whitman, revolutionized American poetry by making it frankly personal and, again along with “Father” Walt, is one of the two most important American poets of the 19th century.  Dickinson herself was as enigmatic as her work; in that very real sense, her poetry reflects who she was.  However, the reader must be wary.  Dickinson herself famously cautioned, in a letter from July 1862, that the “I” or persona in her poems was “a supposed person.”   The critic Harold Bloom observed that when reading Dickinson “One’s mind had better be at its rare best” because there is much to be ferreted from the seemingly simplistic language and rhythmic meters of her considerable body of work. 

So, all things considered, three small dollops may be just enough.

The three poems we’ll be reading and discussing by Dickinson are:

• There’s a certain Slant of light
• After great pain a formal feeling comes
• Because I could not stop for Death

Whether its subject is going out on a formal date with a very persuasive suitor, a near clinical description of the sheer weight and power of grief, or an early lyrical accounting of what might be taken for the very modern syndrome known as seasonal affective disorder, any of these three poems will not fail to astonish in either theme or execution.

Join us at Main Library on Thursday, October 9th from 7:30 to 8:30 in Classroom A in the Center for Museum Education, which is in the hallway of the rear entrance to the library.  Registration is requested, not required (it helps us to figure out how many chairs we need), so to register or further information please contact Renée (412 622-3151) or Don (412 622-3175) or drop us an email at newandfeatured@carnegielibrary.org.

 

– Don