“Tattered Kaddish” by Adrienne Rich

Adrienne Rich
Credit: poetryfoundation.org

For seven decades, Adrienne Rich wrote and published stunning poetry and prose that touched her readers, made them think, and challenged them to shift their perspectives. Much of Rich’s work is explicitly rooted in her identities as mother, housewife, poet, Jew, out lesbian and radical feminist. She wrote about the evolving place of women in modern society, and starting in the 1970s, she became one of the first mainstream poets to write openly about being a lesbian. 

Diana Gioia, a poet and former director of the National Endowment for the Arts wrote of Rich: “No other living poet . . . has made such a profound impression on American intellectual life.” In 1997, to protest proposed funding cuts to the arts and the growing monopoly of power, Rich refused to accept the National Medal of Arts, the highest honor bestowed upon an individual artist in the United States.  

“Tattered Kaddish” is an Adrienne Rich poem written from the perspective of someone who has lost a loved one to suicide. The Mourner’s Kaddish is a Jewish prayer traditionally recited in memory of the dead. “Tattered Kaddish” is about Rich’s former husband, who died by suicide in 1970 at the age of 45. She wrote it 20 years after his death. Responses to suicides can often be harsh, angry and unforgiving. People deem the act selfish. People sometimes have trouble accessing compassion for the immense pain of a suicidal person.  But “Tattered Kaddish” is full of empathy for Rich’s former husband and all victims of suicide.  

Mourner’s Kaddish
Credit: Npr.org

speak your tattered kaddish for all suicides:

Praise to life though it crumbled like a tunnel on ones we knew and
Loved.

Praise to life though its window blew shut on the breathing room of ones
we knew and loved.

Praise to life though ones we knew and loved
loved it badly, too well, and
not enough.

Rich addresses the betrayal sometimes felt by survivors of a suicide; the feeling of not being loved enough to be worth sticking around for.  

Praise to life though it tightened like a knot
on the hearts of ones we thought we knew loved us.  

Credit: biography.com

Rich beseeches us to not reproach suicide victims, but instead to praise them for doing the best they could.  She asks us to praise them in death though they were not able to accept and feel our praise in life.  

Praise to life giving room and reason to ones we knew and loved who felt unpraisable.

Praise to them, how they loved it, when they could.

 “Tattered Kaddish” is a life-affirming poem that reminds survivors of a suicide to exhale in life even in the wake of something as horrible as a loved one dying at their own hand. And it asks us to honor the lives of those who have died by suicide with compassion and celebrate the ways they were able to love life, in the moments when they were able to.