Frances Richey: Healing relationships through art

            Before an intimate group at the Macaulay Honors College on the Upper West Side, Frances Richey read from The Warrior, her second poetry collection.

           Beginning with a career in the corporate world, Richey saw that she lacked fulfillment and satisfaction in her life. This led her to volunteer at a hospice, where her relationships with patients brought her closer to “the reality of her mortality.” Business writing is permeated with “proposals, reports…you’re always making a case and asking for something. However, with poetry, “I could do something I love.”

           Like any concerned and loving mother, Frances Richey and her son, Ben, went through an emotional rollercoaster prior to his deployment to Iraq. Confounded by her son’s decisions to enlist in the army, Richey admits, “I didn’t understand why he was making the choices he was making.” Richey explained that writing was an “attempt to talk to [Ben] and express my feelings, things I couldn’t say to him in person.”

           Richey’s struggle but determination to understand her son’s rationale is illuminated in the poem “His Gun.” Richey “became a student;” observing and comprehending while her son showed her the gear he was gathering before deployment. She describes her urge to learn as “an irresistible pull like gravity or love.” She especially notes the first time she saw Ben with his gun; “the side he hides from me, the dark beauty.”

           Her reading of “Kill School,” about a training camp where soldiers’ physical and mental toughness in the face of death are tested, opened the window to her soul. Richey vivid imagery is felt as Ben describes the “[rabbit’s] softness of fur, another pulse against his chest.” He rocked the rabbit like a “baby in his arms, faster and faster, until every sinew surrendered and he smashed its head into a tree.” My stomach dropped as I pictured his momentary fictitious gentle caressing, then the crushing of its bones. Ben tells his mother, “they make a little squeaking sound, they cry.” Richey writes emphasizes the tension between mother and son while “biting off the skin from my lips.”

           After her reading, Richey explained that Ben “took it personal” when they spoke politics, he thought that “I didn’t approve of what he was doing,” thus causing friction in their relationship. However, through her writing Richey asserts, “you can heal relationships through your art.” Her genuine desire to better their relationship is clear rather than seek the approval of readers is evident; “I wrote poems my son can understand and that’s what I really care about.” Accepting that there will forever be unanswered questions, Richey exclaims the best news that her son completed his service and is back home, and that they have rekindled their relationship: mission accomplished.