Palisades, Devils Tower, Tower Park

I’m sitting on the soft brown couch in Riverdale (the Bronx), listening to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, little Victoria kicking her legs and waving her arms. Andrew is munching on Lucky Charms in between kissing his baby sister.

    Victoria was born 40 minutes after David died. She’s now two months old. It will always be easy to remember the date. Will I remember it more for the death or the life? The life I think. Every year Victoria will change; she’ll have her first birthday, her fifth, her sixteenth. David’s date will be static, slowly fading into the past, but never forgotten.

    Xiomara and I stroll with the grandkids to Wave Hill, a public garden in Riverdale west of Van Cortlandt Park with greenhouses, lawns, two historic homes and spectacular views of the Hudson and the New Jersey Palisades.


The sheer brown cliffs of the Palisades, with their strong vertical lines, remind me of Devils Tower (click on the first image for a slideshow) in Wyoming (featured in Close Encounters of the Third Kind).

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    It’s been a beautiful long autumn. The reds and fiery oranges have fallen on my favorite stretch of Mass. Ave, where Route 2A splits off from Routes 4 and 225, across from Tower Park. In Walgreens’ parking lot, young trees, spectacular in the bright sunshine, seem like flaming torches in between the parked cars.

"The Well of Grief"

            At our church women’s book group the other night, my friend, Carri proposed a night of poetry. She handed round some books to peruse. I picked up Risking Everything: 110 Poems of Love and Revelation by Roger Housden and opened where a tiny sliver of colored paper marked the page. What I read took my breath away. At home I searched for it online.

My favorite YouTube version of "The Well of Grief" by David Whyte is a still picture of a brick-lined well, flush to the ground, the words in a white font scrolling up the photo and a short excerpt from Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings. How can I describe this piece of music? Set aside eleven minutes to watch Leonard Slatkin conducting the BBC Orchestra in the Adagio on September 15, 2001, in honor of those who died four days earlier. Barber expresses the depth of human emotion far better than any words I know how to use. Listen with an open heart and experience its haunting beauty for yourself.

Years ago I played in the viola section of the New Hampshire Philharmonic Orchestra. While we were rehearsing Barber’s Adagio, my stand partner told me that it had played on television during the reporting of John F. Kennedy’s funeral. And now I listen to it and feel the grief for my son.

What music speaks to your soul?