'She’s Gone, She Was Here and Then Gone'

Mike Juster tells me Jane Greer – “North Dakota Jane” – a gifted poet with an ever-ready sense of humor, has died, age seventy-two. In her final Tweet, Jane wrote on July 3: “I’ve been in the hospital and am not sure when they’ll release me. I have diverticulitis and a perforated colon. Prayers appreciated. Personally, I’m praying for and dreaming of large full cups of ice water.” After that, nothing. On July 4 I wrote to her in an email: “If you're still in the hospital tonight, I hope you can at least hear the fireworks.” More silence. I find no obituary as yet posted online. 

The truest way to honor a dead writer is to read her work and keep it alive. Jane sent me signed copies of her most recent books, both published by Lambing Press: Love Like a Conflagration (2020) and The World as We Know it is Falling Away (2022). Collected in the latter volume is “First Elegy,” about the death of a mother by cancer, originally published in First Things in 1994. After surgery and chemotherapy, implacable death returns:

 

“We had barred all the doors to Death, so Death came in the window,

bit through her heart in a moment, she was that easy to undo.

It was no big deal to Death, so nonchalant, sure of itself,

 

“it knew lots of ways to do it, clever mongrel puppy

worrying a rag, one eye on us, but the rag was mother,

she's ruined now, we cannot press her back together,

and our displeasure makes no difference. Death is happy.

 

Greer reminds us: “my relatives have all caught Death, sooner or later, / it’s in our chromosomes, it runs in the family.” She concludes the poem:

 

“.. . . she’s gone, she was here and then gone, and we seem to keep forgetting,

she can’t mix us an old-fashioned, or buy us a perfect present,

what we had is all we have, what we thought was forever isn’t,

we phone each other often, but Death is always on call-waiting.”

 

I wrote about Jane and her work here, here and here.