Chapter 25: Adieu

​When my grandparents, Marnie and Poppy died, I said adieu by writing poems for their funerals. I was called to the top of the mountain to run on Poppy’s last day of life, watching the sunset on his life, I ran with a growing sense of purpose through his continual love and support. Poppy died when a friend from Tibet was staying with us. She had been in the Tibetan Parliament in Exile and gave me books signed by the Dali Lama. She was in Switzerland trying to raise funds for a school for handicapped children when my grandfather passed away.

​Here is a link to her work: https://tibetanparliament.org/81761-2/
 
 
Walt Whitman’s poem written for President Lincoln, incorporates lilacs, the flowers in bloom at Lincoln’s burial, that have a heart shaped leaf. Marnie too died when the lilacs were blooming in the back of the farmhouse at Black Bird Bend Farm. Here is a link to Whitman’s famous poem:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45480/when-lilacs-last-in-the-dooryard-bloomd
Here is an analysis of this famous poem:
https://interestingliterature.com/2020/05/whitman-when-lilacs-last-dooryard-bloomd-analysis/

This is the top of the mountain at sunset