On April 30, 2016, Catholic peacemaker and activist Daniel Berrigan entered life eternal. He was a teacher and friend to many in the Sojourners community. Read more reflections on Dan's life and legacy in the August 2016 issue.
WHEN I WAS BORN—the first child of Dan Berrigan’s brother Phil and Elizabeth McAlister—my uncle sent my parents a sheaf of poetry. On it, he wrote a note: “Dears, I send these with trepidation. They are uneven; but then so is life, no? Love, Daniel.”
My parents put the dozen or so poems in a book and gave them to me on my eighth birthday with their own note: “We don’t expect you to understand all of them yet but you can now begin to read and grow with them.” Yet. Right. I am now 34 years older than I was when I first opened the little red bound book of handwritten poems, and I don’t understand them any better.
But now that my dearest Unka has passed from this world, I hold on tight to this collection and try really hard to understand. It is going to be tough. The poems are full of words the dictionary either fails to define or further confuses—supramundane, Blake’s child, Dante’s paradise (what are boys from middle school doing in Unka’s poetry?), “the bodhisattva is neither stuporous nor sleek / he is crucified.”
Fragments of these poems cycle through my head all the time, a sort of back rhythm to daily life, especially when that daily life was graced with Unka.
Uncle Dan and I would walk—down New York City’s Broadway and through Riverside Park. He breathed in such love for the natural world, even amid the Upper West Side’s hustles and bumps. He saw everything, and found the beauty that was there. The only people that made him mad were delivery men riding bikes on the sidewalks—he had been knocked down once by them and he worried about the elderly—and people who lost themselves in their phones.
Uncle Dan and I would drive—across old Route 17 through the mountains to Syracuse, N.Y., passing Liberty and Deposit along the way. He would exhale in delight at the rock walls crusted in ice or a hillside in full autumn splendor. He would laugh at self-storage parks and new shopping mall construction—“America,” we’d chuckle, “so hard to find and never finished.”
America is hard to find. We were a home for our peripatetic uncle—Baltimore and Syracuse (and Eschaton on Block Island). My dad wrote to his brother on Easter Sunday, 1974, when I was two weeks old. He describes anti-war actions in Washington, D.C., and then: “Frida Danielle thrives and sends you burps and chortles of love. She is somewhere near 11 lbs. already. I’ll save some space for Liz while assuring you of love and peace, all of which the Savior promises us. Peace be with you, and to our friends. Be well and care for yourself. We love you.”
I am struck—reading his poems again as I mourn my Unka, as I ache with missing him, as I cling to these poems as part of him and as evidence that he loved me—how he began my instruction in death as a part of life early, so early. All the poems refer to death, revolve around death, involve his meditations on the life I will live after he leaves.
May you live, cry the birds
beloved, wise, and die
sustained by those you sustained
your memory a stigma
pressed like a birthmark
on the tissue of the living
trees; she harmed no one of us
children; we bear her name.
Unka, it is a testament to your life that this poem you wrote for me 42 years ago could serve as an epitaph for you. Trees, you marveled at each one. Children, countless (including me), bear your name.
Dan.Frida_.Young_.jpg
Frida Berrigan helped to found Witness Against Torture in 2005. She writes the Little Insurrections blog for WagingNonviolence.org and is the author of It Runs In The Family: On Being Raised By Radicals and Growing Into Rebellious Motherhood (OR Books). Frida lives in New London, Connecticut with her husband Patrick and three kids.
Got something to say about what you're reading? We value your feedback!