Words to Live By

Poems offered me an anchor as I lost my son, so I shared them

- Josie Glausiusz

In the early hours of March 23, 2023, about 12 hours before our treasured 12-year-old son died from a rare form of brain cancer, I climbed into his bed at Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem, wrapped him in my arms and recited the poem "Jabberwocky":

"'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves / Did gyre and gimble in the wabe..."

My child was no longer conscious, but I hoped and believed that he could sense my presence, and that my voice would comfort him and soothe his furiously beating heart.

My son had learned the words to Lewis Carroll's nonsense poem by listening to me recite it to him and his twin sister at bedtime. A brave, bright, imaginative, optimistic boy, he loved the drama of the poem and the courage of the "beamish boy" as, with his "vorpal sword" in hand, he defeats his "manxome foe." My son was also a passionate reader.

But toward the end of a year punctured by surgeries, rounds of radiation, hospitalizations and medications, it was harder for him to focus. Instead, I would sit beside his hospital bed and read aloud to him, mostly Richmal Crompton's Just William stories.

One evening in the hospital in mid-February, I read him some of my favorite poems-poems that my mother had read to me as a child. "Cargoes" by John Masefield ("Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir / Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine") and a Shakespeare sonnet ("When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes").

He listened, rapt and smiling. Then we talked about the meaning of the poems.

A few days later, I started my own poetry group on WhatsApp, calling it Poetry Is Medicine, and invited friends to join. I had found, during earlier crises, that the rhythm of poetry can soothe my anxieties. With just a word or a phrase, a poem can reach the hidden places that prayers or well-meaning advice cannot.