Here’s what I had in common with my Dad:  Both Virgos, highly organized, liked poetry.

Dad once gave me his worn copy of The Best Loved Poems of the American People.

I wrote poetry when I was a young woman. Then it seemed that the sadder I felt, the better my poetry became. I didn’t like that aspect, so I stopped.

That said, I can still recite aloud Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29, Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken, and two poems by Christina Rossetti. Although I’m not sure anyone is lining up to hear my recitation.

When I commuted to work each morning, I tuned in to NPR’s Writer’s Almanac, narrated by Garrison Keillor. I heard many interesting tales of writers’ lives over the years. To me the highlight of each show was near the end because each segment closed with a poem.

The various poems produced varying reactions in me. Some of them made me laugh out loud (on purpose), some were sad, some were ironic.

And a handful were filled with such poignancy that I nearly had to pull over so I could think profoundly on them. Here’s one of them, by Jeffrey Harrison.

A Drink of Water 

When my nineteen-year-old son turns on the kitchen tap
and leans down over the sink and tilts his head sideways
to drink directly from the stream of cool water,
I think of my older brother, now almost ten years gone,
who used to do the same thing at that age;

and when he lifts his head back up and, satisfied,
wipes the water dripping from his cheek
with his shirtsleeve, it’s the same casual gesture
my brother used to make; and I don’t tell him
to use a glass, the way our father told my brother,

because I like remembering my brother
when he was young, decades before anything
went wrong, and I like the way my son
becomes a little more my brother for a moment
through this small habit born of a simple need,

which, natural and unprompted, ties them together
across the bounds of death, and across time …
as if the clear stream flowed between two worlds
and entered this one through the kitchen faucet,
my son and brother drinking the same water.

“A Drink of Water” by Jeffrey Harrison, from Into Daylight. © Tupelo Press, 2014. Reprinted with permission of the author. For more poems by Jeffrey Harrison,  see jeffreyharrisonpoet.com

Having lost my son Tim eight years ago when he was 22, that poem resonated deeply with me. While I don’t recall him drinking from the faucet, the poem brought to the surface other aspects of him. I see him in my daughter’s face and in her quick wit. Tim comes alive in the way my grandson Danny laughs and in the light-up-the-room smile of my grandson Brandon.

When the people we love die, it’s a comfort to see remembrances of them live on in others. I think that’s a beautiful gift from God.

I’m choosing to believe that my generosity of spirit, wanting to help others, is the part of Tim that lives on in me.

Although this particular blog posted on October 8, I wrote it on October 6.

Happy Birthday, Tim.

To my readers: What special quality of a loved one who has died do you see living on in another?