We meet in the church basement on the second evening of the month,
The specific congregation of the dealing with the blunt,
Reality of chronic illness in the carpeted room,
With the folding chairs and the coffee and the afternoon gloom.
We know each other by the condition and the story,
By the medication and the specific purgatory,
Of the managing and the adapting and the not quite right,
The community of those who’ve lost the ordinary light.
The support group, the church basement and the fold,
The support group, the specific cold,
Of the fluorescent and the coffee and the someone finally saying,
What they haven’t said to anyone, the weighing,
Of the things we don’t take to the people who are well,
The support group and the things we have to tell.
I was resistant in the beginning to the sharing format,
The going-around-the-circle felt like a combat,
Of forced intimacy in the plastic chair,
With strangers and their suffering in the air.
But six months in I understood the specific relief,
Of talking to the ones who’ve felt the same specific grief,
Of the condition, who don’t need the preamble and the explain,
Who nod before you finish because they share the same.
The man who’s been attending for four years knows the arc,
Of how a new person comes in carrying the dark,
Of the recent diagnosis and the not yet adapted state,
And he meets it with the specific quiet weight,
Of someone who has walked the corridor already and returned,
Not fixed but more familiar with the things that can’t be turned.
There is a kind of expertise that only comes from sitting,
In the condition for the years and recommitting,
To the management when the management feels like too much,
The support group is where you find that specific touch.