One year for a birthday present, someone gave me a vintage album of my mom’s favorite song: “Cherry Bomb” by John Mellencamp. It was beautiful, and such a collector’s item. The original recording happened to take place during the year and month I was born: August of 1987. It was meant to be a sweet gesture, but the truth was, my heart sunk and my eyes filled with tears, and I couldn’t understand how such a nice gesture could make me feel so distraught. The whole next day, I learned a harsh reality to losing my mom at twelve years old: Every happy moment in my life will be bittersweet. No matter the joy, it will inevitably sink in that my mother will not be there to enjoy whatever it is with me; to see me grow, to watch me smile; and that no matter how you slice it, that is so very sad.

Always being an ambitious person both personally and professionally, I often pictured milestones: my first job, book release, wedding, birth of my children. And I can’t think of any of these moments without seeing the obligatory empty chair that my mom should be filling. The daily phone call I don’t get to make that so many others take for granted. The reassuring glance I have almost forgotten. I can get easily overwhelmed imagining any one of these moments.

My mom passed away sixteen years ago after suffering from cancer and its horrendous complications for nearly twenty years of her life, and for all of mine. I learned a lot about my mom while researching and writing The Butterfly Groove, but I was also able to imagine how she handled her own life’s milestones. I am comforted by now knowing the true series of events in her life that I wasn’t aware of previously. Along with the truth, I was fortune enough to learn how these experiences both inspired and influenced her choices: whether positively, negatively, or seemingly not at all. I call it learning the emotional genealogy of a person. I always knew where I came from, but I wanted to know from whom I came from.

It was one, always one, that pushed me into love. I say pushed because it was forceful, it was unseen, and it took the wind out of me. I had read a few before, poems I was instructed to, guided through, and tested on, but none stuck. None felt whilst reading, how I felt while sitting, staring at blank blackboards, counting every tick of every clock within earshot, waiting for the classes to end. Then it came, as suddenly as the joy rises in his work, as clearly as his observation, and I was pushed into love.

Walt Whitman may seem like a cliché choice to mention as a poet that has helped shape the writer, and more, the man I am today, but like all great clichés, it’s true, and it’s honest. When I first read “When I Heard The Learn’d Astronomer,” something, and maybe it was the first something, made sense, and I for the first time felt like I did, as well. Being taught was something I struggled with, attention span lacks and boredom were things that I wrestled with every day of my school career, and reading this poem served as an introduction not only to Whitman and his entire way of seeing the world, but of being understood by someone, somewhere, even long since gone. Since the first reading, and every time I read it still, it makes me feel like maybe, just maybe the way I see the world isn’t so strange, that maybe it is okay to find miracles in all the mundane and simple things, that maybe walking in complete amazement at all times is a blessing, and not a curse to be corrected and normalized.