Offerings: The Decluttering of a Life

The author, born in mid-twentieth-century Kansas, experiences the overnight death of her much-older, much-adored, only sister from polio, throwing her, at age seven, into the melee of her parents’ anxiety and depression. Having rejected her mother’s fundamentalist religion at age twelve, she has nothing to replace it and no one to talk with about her own grief and terror. Slowly, through the disciplines of journal writing, reading about and discussing the journeys of others, becoming a serious poet and a dedicated amateur pianist, she starts to put together a vision of life (and death) based on the power of creativity, not only in her own life, but in the world and the universe itself. These growing insights she uses through the challenges of three marriages, three children, the apparent indifference to, and then increasing acceptance of, her artistic work. Eventually, in her seventies, she comes to some important realizations about it all.