By Sara Henning

My mother never took formal dance lessons, but that didn’t stop her from hanging a large portrait of Mikhail Nikolayevich Baryshnikov in our living room. Saturday afternoons, I’d sometimes catch her, bare feet and leg warmers, leaping across the kitchen floor or spinning like a top, MTV blaring. She danced without form or technique and since I, too, was not a dancer, I had neither knowledge nor language for the magic she created with her body: jeté, pirouette. What mattered was that I saw my single mother joyful in the kitchen of our small duplex. I saw my mother—same woman forced to bury my father a handful of years before—exuberant. I didn’t know how important these small moments of joy would be when my mother was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer at the age of 59, how I would hold onto them when bilirubin from a failed liver turned her jaundiced, how I would hold them even harder as she was moved to hospice, my desperate daughter’s clutch becoming vice grip as she took her last breath in May of 2016.

Shortly after my mother passed away, I encountered a copy of Ross Gay’s gorgeous collection of poems Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (2015), which I devoured in one sitting. It was during this time that I discovered his remarkable poem “Burial,” a poem I would turn to constantly during the throes of my personal mourning.

An elegy for his father, “Burial” recounts the act of pouring a father’s ashes into a son’s garden while planting plum trees. What happens after, as Gay tells us, is pure magic: “Yes, / the magic dust our bodies become casts spells on the roots,” Gay says as his father’s spirit dives into the earth, laughing, again a citizen of “the nation of simple joy.” What proceeds is transformational gymnastics, the father “breast-stroking into the xylem,” riding the “cambium’s” elevator to the “leaves” where he speaks to his son as he might have years before, a young father to a child: “good morning.” The emotionally honest, if wonderfully fantastical, rendering of the father’s pleasure continues as the first plums of the season ripen, the father “peering out from the sweet meat / with his hands pressed against the purple skin / like cathedral glass,” “guffaw[ing],” smearing juice down his son’s shirt.

Readers unfamiliar with grief may struggle to see how a son projecting his lost father into a fruit tree planted with his own hands is miraculous. Some readers, ungenerously, may frame the son’s way of navigating grief as the stuff of whimsy, delusion, or nostalgia. However capricious Gay’s imagery becomes (to me, this is part of the poem’s delight), those of us who have had to bury someone close to us know well the benefits of healing embedded in these acts of projection, magical thinking, and fantasy.

In 2025, the decades-old Kübler-Ross model of grief is an established facet of our collective system of knowledge—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. We have come to feel its influence all too often during acts of God like Hurricane Helene, epidemics like COVID-19 and the opioid crisis, and the horrors of war in Ukraine and Palestine. However, acceptance has never been enough for me. What do we make of acceptance when, as in Gay’s poem, life support is pulled from a father’s body while a mother weeps out the words “it’s ok, it’s ok, you can go now honey”? How do we live with and carry that acceptance when it ceases to console?

In 2019, grief expert David Kessler suggested a sixth stage of grief as an addition to Kübler-Ross’s model: finding meaning. He proposed that finding meaning beyond simple acceptance allows those mourning a method to transform grief into a more proactive outlook, such as seeking consolation in the gifts of wisdom and love our lost ones imparted to us during their time on earth. Carrying these gifts forward is an intentional way of exchanging grief for the choice to honor their powerful legacies.

It is my belief that Gay, by allowing his father to be reborn into a plum tree, has restored his father’s memory into something dynamic, something nurturing. He is a vibrant father who “almost danc[es] now in the plum, / in the tree, the way he did as a person, / bent over and biting his lip / and chucking the one hip out / then the other with his elbows cocked.” And why did Gay’s father, any father, dance in this way? Because “he knew he could make you happy / just by being a little silly / and sweet.” Through the act of transformation, Gay’s father becomes again the man the poet spent his whole life cherishing, a man dancing to the beat of love, dancing to the rhythm of his heart’s call.

By planting the father’s ashes into the plum tree, Gay gives his father a vehicle not just to thrive, but to dance again. Now, when I read “Burial” (which I do, often), I don’t think of my mom on her oxygen tank, legs swollen with edema. I don’t think of her hospice bed in the middle of her living room. Gay’s poem taught me to see her with MTV blaring Culture Club’s “Karma Chameleon,” spinning and leaping in our kitchen like a self-taught Baryshnikov. Her eyes are closed as sun filters through our lace curtains. She’s smiling.

---

Sara Henning is the author of the poetry collections Burn (Southern Illinois
University Press, 2024), a Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Editor’s Selection; Terra Incognita (Ohio UP, 2022), winner of the 2021 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize; and View from True North (SIU Press, 2018). She teaches at Marshall University.