Jan Haag taught journalism, English and creative writing at Sacramento City College for more than three decades before her 2021 retirement. A former magazine editor, she is the author of Companion Spirit, a collection of poems about her husband’s death published by Amherst Writers & Artists Press. She leads in-person writing groups in Sacramento, as well as virtual ones, in which the topic of grief and loss often arises. Read more of her beautiful writing here.

My hands are powerful healing tools
They know exactly where to apply
their healing energy. I handle my life
with love.

—affirmation on the bulletin board in
my mother’s home treatment room

Again and again, on sheets of paper
I find in her handwriting—notes and
reflections for literally hundreds
of classes she took as a holistic healer—

she squirrels away words like energy and
healing like nourishing nuggets stored
for retrieval in bleak moments.

Love bubbles up again and again—
the wish to live a loving life, to create love,
to be a gentle and kind person, which
she could be with so many she served,
but far less so with my father,
my sister and me.

She never felt loved enough,
appreciated enough, listened to enough.
She found it easier to explode and harder
to summon patience and kindness.

Yet now that she’s gone, I search for
her gentler side, so elusive in life,
in notes she took for hundreds of classes
and seminars, her writing on decades-old
pages in a hand that I can still decipher,

or in a quote still tacked to the bulletin
board in the room that had once been mine
in that house of chronic angers—
the aspiration to walk lovingly
through the world.

I hope that, nearing her end, we gave
her what she so craved, that, as she
she slipped away, not wanting to
leave the body that could no longer
house her soul,

that what she felt from us—from
those who’d gone before, from
the vastness of the universe she
so embraced, what she’d longed for
all her long life—

turned out to be only kindness,
that all was forgiven, her rancor
vanquished, leaving nothing
but the love to carry her
into mystery.