Poems: For you & here

Jacqueline Nader Kumar is a PhD student researching teachers’ experiences, relationships, retention, and burnout in K-12 schools. She has a husband and a young daughter, the light of her life. Her mom, Ann Marie, passed in May 2022. Jacqueline is continuously guided and inspired by her mom’s unconditional love, giving and compassionate spirit, and desire to protect those most vulnerable among us.

Jacqueline shared these poems about her grief experience with the members of her Parent Loss Support Group at Transitions GriefCare, as a way of acknowledging and honoring the vulnerability and courage she observed in each of them as they supported one another.

For you

We are heroes,
We don’t feel it.
What we feel is pain,
And loss,
as we walk across the sinkholes of our hearts.

How much we miss and ache,
But still we stand, witness.
“Here I am”
is the beauty you share without saying it
Here I am for you
Here I am for myself.

We know, actually, our loss
Is because of our love.
The ones who don’t lose
Are the ones who don’t care.
And still we continue to show up
Tired, we show up
Reluctant, we show up
Sick and sick of mourning, we show up.

We didn’t hide from the shit.
Or from each other.
Or from ourselves.
Being here
“I am here”
Is the greatest tribute to each other
And to our beloved ones too.

Do we see, can we hold,
That we are here because they existed
Now, they are here because we exist
Cell of their own cell.
We remember, we acknowledge
We walk, shards and all
Our every presence
An act of courage.

here

this being human
IS
raw
whether we choose
to acknowledge it.

the people who
hold space for you
who choose to see
you
however you show up —
they are
your angels.

don’t forget
that there
ARE
people here
to love and
hear you.

in life,
they’ll come.
you don’t always know
from where.
but they’ll come.