May 1, 2003
Gardener poet finds healing in words
On the morning of Dec. 31, 2000, Kristen Spexarth woke up to learn that her son had not come home the night before. Worried, she began making phone calls, trying to track him down. Then, a short time later, the police came to the door and told her that 22-year-old Colby had checked into a motel and killed himself.
The pain, the veteran UW gardener remembers now, was beyond anything she could have imagined. “It’s almost hard to look back on it and to remember the level of catastrophe that that was,” she says. “Everything, my entire life was erased. I know that’s hard for people to understand and it isn’t something that’s logical or rational or something I can explain. The force of that grief coming at me, that knowledge, trying to incorporate it, I was wiped off the face of the earth.”
But out of that pain came a healing — not just for Spexarth but for others who suffer as she did. Because eventually, she began to write.
It started in the weeks after Colby’s death. Spexarth took a month off work and wound up going to Idaho to help her sister-in-law, who was having surgery. There, sitting in hospital waiting rooms, sitting in her sister-in-law’s home, she found herself writing poetry.
That she would do so came as a complete surprise to Spexarth, who had long kept a journal in which she recorded everything from daily events to dreams. But she had never before written poetry. “I’d tried a couple times but I didn’t feel I had that vehicle in me. I wished I did but I didn’t know how.”
Now, however, the poems sprang forth in what she calls an “involuntary act.” The torrent didn’t abate when Spexarth returned to Seattle and her work on the grounds of the campus.
“The writing just poured out of me,” she says. “As soon as I would lie down to go to sleep it was as if the words were pouring into my head and I had to get up again. I had to write it down. I had paper with me constantly. I’d be on the bus writing. It was as close a rendering of what was real for me as I could do.”
Meanwhile, Spexarth remained detached from what the rest of us would call real life. “The extent of the devastation to my life was so overwhelming,” she says, “I truly was adrift. I couldn’t really have conversations with people; I was just writing. And if other people were around, I would say, ‘Do you want to listen to this?’ And I would read them the poems. The poems became my link to the world.”
Six months passed before Spexarth was able to reach out for help. She went to the King County Crisis Clinic and began attending a support group called Survivors of Suicide (SOS). But even there, she couldn’t really talk. When her turn came, she would ask if she could read her poetry. The group members listened and were supportive.
“Their response taught me that maybe this could be a benefit to other people,” she says.
So the thought crossed her mind that maybe the poems should be published, but Spexarth was still in no shape to make it happen. The logistics of finding a publisher were beyond her capacities at the time.
Then, in the summer of 2001, Michelle Duncan, the group facilitator for the SOS group, asked Spexarth if she would come to a training of Crisis Clinic volunteers and read some of her poems. The volunteers would be staffing the clinic’s phone lines and Duncan wanted them to have some idea of the experiences of the people they’d be dealing with. Spexarth agreed, but even then she didn’t interact. She read the poems and she left.
Shortly after, she was contacted by Bill Sieckowski, a volunteer who had been at the training. He told her that he worked for a publishing company and that he would help her publish the poems for free; all she had to do was pay for materials. The company Sieckowski works for doesn’t usually publish literary efforts. Their specialty was and is cleaning manuals. But Sieckowski’s boss agreed to give Spexarth free press time and Sieckowski, a graphic artist, donated his time in putting the book together. It was published by BS Graphics, Sieckowski’s independent business.
“We worked through e-mail, so I never even met Bill until I picked up the books,” Spexarth says. “But I know he spent an enormous amount of time doing this and I am very grateful to him.”
The resulting book is called Passing Reflections, a 200-page collection of the poems Spexarth couldn’t stop from coming. She has read from her work several times since her stint at the volunteer training, mostly at Crisis Clinic events.
“Every time I have read, people have come up to me afterward to tell me about a suicide in their own family,” she says. “It is everywhere. I don’t believe there’s an individual who has not been touched by suicide, and yet no one talks about it.”
That’s why Spexarth is hoping that her book will do some good. It could be, she thinks, a vehicle for starting a conversation about what has up until now been considered a shameful secret. People who kill themselves, she says, do so because they are suffering terribly, and there is no wisdom in heaping judgements on top of terrible suffering.
“I feel that my task now is to present and to teach this material,” she says. “You don’t say about suicide, ‘This is a bad thing and I don’t want to look at it.’ We need to look at it and we need to help each other.”
Passing Reflections is available at University Book Store.
