Behind Sightlines: A Poet’s Diary
by Janet Grace Riehl

On August 16, 2004, my sister Julia Ann Thompson, 61, was killed in a car wreck. Julia’s work as a world-class physicist coupled with her far-reaching efforts for equality and justice made a profound difference in the world.

Julia’s husband, Dave Kraus, and my mother, Ruth Thompson, were severely injured in the accident. Julia and Dave’s grandson, Cody, was pulled out of the car by a Good Samaritan. Dave, through skill, care, and willpower, slowly traveled from hospital bed to crutches to cane to walking unaided to driving a car. Mother, after escaping death by a hairsbreadth in the hospital, spent several months in a nursing home mending her broken shoulder and ankle. Cody appears to be back to a relatively normal boyhood.

In the year following my sister’s death, I spent the bulk of my time in Southwestern Illinois at Evergreen Heights, the home pioneered in the 1860s by my Great Grandfather Riehl, and our homeplace still. I wanted to come closer to the family core, and be part of building a fire we could warm our hands around.

For my 56th birthday in December 2004 I went into a small retreat at King’s House, run by the Oblate Fathers of Mary Immaculate in Belleville, Illinois. During this time, I came to a strong sense that the world is charged with meaning, and that is a poem. Not could be, but is. The only trick is to tease out the meaning.

In January 2005 the book began. Drinking morning tea out of an old-fashioned shaving mug, surrounded by enough antiques to make a collector drool, I cocked one ear towards my inner voices and the other for sounds of my parents stirring downstairs. When I heard them on the move, I dropped whatever I was doing to rush to help my mother get dressed and ready for the day.

The work moved back and forth between my Midwest home to my Northern California home on the shores of Clear Lake where the whirl of extended family, visitors, and renters of the Midwest quieted to just me, my sweetheart, and an old cat.

In childhood, I often watched my sister Julia put together 1,000 piece jigsaw puzzles. Putting together this poet’s diary has been a little like that. It’s a chronicle of my family and I picking up the puzzle pieces of our lives, studying them in light of Julia’s absence, and then looking where to place the next piece. Sometimes we get just the right fit. But, there are a pile of pieces still waiting to be sorted.

Mortality became keenly real to me over the past year as my parents and I aged together and we marked the anniversary of Julia’s death. The sorrow of life’s fragility and joy at its tenderness form the sightlines of this collection of poems.