My Loss Poem

Yesterday that girl across the street
died of a tumor bigger than the
head she was born with, reminding
me of all I have lost, starting with

a parakeet my mother wanted instead of me
who flew out my window,
and that doll whose arms got eaten by our neighbor’s dog,
and then grandma who swallowed

too many orange sleeping pills,
in her room beside mine,
those sheer curtains waving their final good-bye.
Then Pixie, our gray cat who ran away,

and Mon Ami, another cat, black as the asphalt,
flattened by a speeding car
and then the boy next door
who I had a crush on
years before he took his own life because his mother

hated him and then my best friend,
Nancy, fourteen, with long silken blonde hair,
sprawled out on that pavement after being
tossed in the air by a speeding bullet car,

only years before grandpa died on the operating
room table from a bleeding aorta while I sat
in a reticent room taking my nursing exams.

Then Lynda, my nursing mentor
who taught me how to give injections,
the same ones which killed her as she bolted
from a twenty-story building,

then dad, who taught me how to love.
May he rest in peace, surviving thirty years
after the Holocaust.

For fifteen years there’ve been no losses,
until yesterday when my friend Barbara,
the one who taught me how to be a mom,
died years before we were ready to
wave to her on the other side.

Life is unpredictable
It makes you move forward and stop at the same time.

---

By Diana Raab. Published in The Stray Branch Spring/Summer 2026.