You’ll Need Me When They’re Gone: The Poems We Reach For in Grief

I began composing the work that would eventually become Why I Didn’t Go to Your Funeral in 2010, and when I read these new poems publicly a strange thing occurred. Whereas at previous readings my work mostly elicited the generic I-Liked-That-One-Poem-About-X reaction from polite listeners, audience members now came up after and began confessing their own difficulties with death and grief. A woman in Vermont broke down crying while she discussed the loss of her husband. In a San Antonio poetry bar, a middle-aged man stared down into his Lone Star can and spoke to me about his mother’s suicide.

While this was not what I expected, I am all too aware of the place contemporary poetry occupies for most people: They reach for poems when they’re in love or when they’re coping with death. By writing through my own grief, I’d inadvertently touched upon a topic that people seemed eager to discuss aloud. As I’ve continued to read from this book, I’m always struck by the taboo nature of this subject. And to be clear, the subject isn’t death itself, but how those of us left behind seem unable to engage with our grief in a public way. There simply doesn’t appear to be a space for this engagement outside a psychiatrist’s office.

Poetry therapists and other psychiatric scholars have been studying the effects of poetry on trauma for some time now. In discusses the clinical benefits of writing through grief. The findings include grief writing’s beneficial effects on that appeared on ’s (’s) online journal ONE posits that there are four main reasons why people listen to sad music when they’re sad: It activates the imagination, regulates emotion, provides empathy, and releases the listener from causal implication. I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to say that poetry often provides these same benefits for bereaved readers.