Beloved

This weekend I have been sticking some of the cards, emails and messages I’ve been sent over the last few months into a scrapbook, to remind me of the incredible love and support I’ve been shown. And it’s reminded me of the poem Late Fragment by Raymond Carver:

Did you get what you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved,
To feel myself beloved on this earth.

I’ve discovered that it’s the final poem in his final book of poems, written while he was dying of cancer. I don’t know if he wrote it about his own experience, but I’ve found that this illness has given both me and the people around me a reason to say how much we mean to each other, when too often those things just don’t get said. It’s been really moving re-reading what people have written to me and I’m echoing the words in that poem – I can call myself beloved, and feel myself beloved on this earth. Thank you.