Life with Sam

Photographs by Simeon Hutner

Foreword by Rafael Campo, Ph. D.

Elizabeth Hall Hutner was a writer, scholar and musician who lived in Princeton, N.J., where she completed her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at Princeton University. Her short essays have been published in A Real Life, a bimonthly magazine. Hutner graduated from Yale University, where she studied with Mark Strand and J.D. McClatchy, and she worked with Marvin Bell at the Breadloaf Writer’s Conference. She also held a Master of Arts from Princeton. She died of breast cancer in November, 2002. In 2004, her collection of poetry, Life With Sam, was published as the first entry in CavanKerry’s LaurelBooks collection.

Spiritual Teacher

I thought you would be older than I am.
I thought I would recognize the classroom.
I was sure that every day you would say something I
couldn’t understand.
I expected that it would take years to figure out what
you meant.
I thought I’d have to travel far away to find you.

Instead you were little but strong.
I didn’t go anywhere to meet you because you came
to me.
At first, you took what you needed and didn’t even say
thank you.
I had to teach you.
You couldn’t even speak in the beginning.
And once you learned, you had the questions.
In clinic one day, as I held you sleeping in my lap
After a procedure, one of the doctors stopped and said,
You look like the Pietà 2.

This wasn’t what I expected at all.
I never knew I could love anyone so much.
I never believed my child could die before me.
I never thought we would spend most of our time together
in the hospital.
I didn’t expect you to look at me with eternity in your eyes.
I didn’t expect the light around us when I looked at you.

As I read this book over and over again, the tears welling in my eyes answered for me: yes, here is a life and a poetry that does matter . . .Hutner’s large-hearted work joins her not only with the greatest parent-elegists of lost sons—Ben Jonson, Ralph Waldo Emerson—but also with a poetics older even than Horace . . . Reading these poems, whose rhythms pound as hotly and audibly as the emaciated boy’s heart against his mother’s ear, whose memorable rhymes are like watermarks of tears on every page, we are returned to the purest, most elemental beginning of poetry.
— Rafael Campo, Ph.D.

This book . . . is a celebration of the life of a little boy named Sam . . . The photographs . . . could not be better or more poignant. Ms. Hutner’s poetry is not only moving, but is also that of a mother in profound grief over the greatest loss any of us can experience—the loss of a child. As an expression of personal feeling and memories, this book has no peer . . .
— Eric F. Grabowski, M.D., Sc.D.Attending Pediatrician, Mass General Hospital for ChildrenAssociate Professor of Pediatrics, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA

When a person hears the doctor say, “You have cancer,” it is impossible to comprehend what that means. Will I live? How will this change my life? How will this affect my family? When the person is a child, it is the whole family who asks the questions: the mother, the father, the brothers and sisters, the grandparents. This book shows us how one family lived. It will be valuable for all families, whether children are sick or well, to make us remember what the family is all about.
— Anne Moore, M.D.Professor of Clinical Medicine, Hematology and Oncology, Cornell University New York Presbyterian Hospital, New York

December 2004
59 pp
Trade paper – 6 x 9.25
$14
ISBN 978-0-9707186-5-5
LaurelBooks