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Hello and welcome to this week's newsletter.
This week we’re introducing the third of our new poetic medicines for autumn.
First came The Reading Cure, then Glimmers, and now we’re very delighted to introduce Expiry Date.
This is a bottle Deb has wanted to put together for a long time.
Over the years, many people have come into the Poetry Pharmacy looking for something for a friend or family member who has been diagnosed with a terminal illness, or for words that might help someone they love face the knowledge of their own approaching death. And there has always seemed to be a gap on the bookshelf: something to give to someone who knows they are going to die, who does not wish to look away from that fact of their own limited life.
And, of course, in the end that means all of us.
Expiry Date is a bottle of poems for contemplating our limited time here, and for remembering what makes that time matter. The extracts are about being alive while we can: paying attention, loving well, noticing beauty, accepting change and finding some peace with the fact that nothing lasts forever.
They are beautiful, life-affirming and, we hope, reassuring. They can be read quietly on your own, shared with someone you love, or used as a way of beginning conversations that can otherwise feel impossibly difficult to start. And they may be just as useful for the family and friends accompanying someone towards the end of their life as for the person who is dying.
We’ve created Expiry Date in collaboration with Dead Good, founded by Katy and Lindsey Vigurs. Deb had long admired their work and the wonderfully colourful, warm and imaginative way they approach death, dying and funerals. Their refusal to make death grey and solemn, resonated strongly with what Deb wanted to do through poetry: acknowledge what is coming, make room to talk about it, and perhaps help us feel a little less afraid.
As Katy and Lindsey put it:
“We loved making Expiry Date with the Poetry Pharmacy. Inside the bottle are snippets of poetry chosen to interrupt ordinary life with a small reminder: you are alive, but it won’t always be so. That might sound gloomy, but we promise it isn't. Rather, it’s a form of modern memento mori. Remembering that our lives are finite can sharpen our attention to them. It can help us notice what matters, what we’re postponing, who we love, what we want to make, mend, say, begin or stop doing altogether.
You could keep your Expiry Date bottle somewhere you’ll encounter it in your daily life. On your desk. By the kettle. Beside your bed. Pass it around the kitchen table. Take it to the coffee shop. Bring it out on birthdays or New Year’s Eve.
And maybe ask yourself these questions:
What does this help you to notice?
Who or what does it bring to mind?
What feels vivid because it won’t last forever?
What are you holding onto? What are you learning to let go?
And what might remain?
There’s no right way to respond to what you pull from the bottle. Some words might bring someone to mind. Others might make you look differently at the day you’re in. Perhaps that’s enough. To spend a little time with the fact that we are here, that things change, and that none of us gets to keep any of it forever.
You don’t have to arrive at an answer. The contemplation is the practice.
At DEAD GOOD, we think of this as practising mortality, making a little room for death in the midst of life.
The Expiry Date bottle is one small way to begin practising mortality in your own wild and precious life.”
Katy and Lindsey Vigurs
Peace
There is only silence
On the mountain tops
Among the tips of the trees
You perceive barely a breath
Even the birds in the forest
Keep still and are silent
Wait then
Just a little while longer
And you too
will find peace at last.
J. W. Von Goethe
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