  
imee Grunberger lived fast and hard. She died slow--in gratitude. Even her Shiva candle burned so fast it didn't even last seven days. Died young, too. Forty-four. Born with a poet's discerning eye, irrepressible humor, and a gnawing, relentless penchant for raw truth, she knew that poetry was her calling long before she set out from her Stamford home in the early '70s.
With her, she carried all the words you'll ever need, a gift from a teacher who'd admonished: "Just put them in the most convincing order." Over the course of 25 years, Aimee Grunberger would.Oh, did she. But, in the early '90s, irony interceded: And just at the point Aimee found herself as a poet, the doctors found breast cancer. Two questions remained: How long could she live? How much could she write? A master of irony, so was the arc of Aimee's creative life. She blossomed late, published late, and would not live to see her greatest honor: her work read along with that of a thousand visionaries--spiritual and political leaders, poets, singers, community activists, and young people--at a three-day ceremony at United Nations World University for Peace in Costa Rica on New Year's 2000, Invocations for a New Millenium: "Visions, Prayers, Guidance and Reflections from Around the World" (later to be published in an anthology by HarperCollins). In fact, by the time word of this achievement had been delivered to Aimee's bedside, she didn't trust her own mind; the mind that had earned her the recognition that she so tenaciously sought. She battled cancer for almost six furious years, publishing two collections of poetry, Ten Degrees Cooler Inside (1992) and Hope for the Wrong Thing (1993). Her poem, "Goodbye To All That," was included in the anthology, "American Poets Say Goodbye to the 20th Century" (1996)--100 contemporary poets' thoughts on century's end. Twice, she was a finalist for The Academy of American Poets' Walt Whitman Poetry Prize. At her height, she basked in relative obscurity except in Boulder, where she was "that bald woman with the gypsy scarf." A self-professed "den-mother-by-day" (twin teenage sons) beat-poet-by-night," Aimee Grunberger died peacefully in her Colorado home March 27, 1998, surrounded by family and friends. Said the poet Anne Waldman of Aimee, "She railed with grace." Aimee Grunberger leaves over 200 unpublished poems--poems that eloquently and gracefully cry out seeking understanding and searching for the meaning of life. I didn't know Aimee Grunberger while she lived. She was my best friend's sister. He invited me to write her obituary and, in the process, I got to know her through her work after she had died. What follows is part of the creative legacy of a woman in her prime, gone too soon.
|
-Howie Sann