What Really Matters: Poems About Love, Loss, & Trauma

This is a collection of poems inspired by love, loss of love, and other tragic and traumatic events that began in late July of 2000 - so some poems are about love and others about the loss of that love. This is my autobiography in poetry form. I had fallen totally and completely, madly in love with Lynn Denise Krupey. Tragically, she was born with a terminal genetic illness. At the age of just 33, in July of 2000, Lynn was fighting for her life... and I felt powerless. I also had survivor's guilt.

A fuller account of my life can be found in other books of mine. After the poems about love, there are poems with titles like "Post Traumatic Stress Disorder," "Fugue State," and "Lost." Once you join your life with another person, you become one and so the loss of that person (or in my case along with other traumatic events) can feel like one has no sense of a home or a personal identity.

I never actually had a fugue state disorder, but it is a great metaphor for what I did experience.

From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugue_state), we have the definition of a Fugue state: a mental and behavioral disorder... The disorder is a rare psychiatric abnormality characterized by reversible amnesia for one's own personal identity, including the memories, personality, and other identifying characteristics of individuality. The state can last days, months, or longer. A dissociative fugue usually involves unplanned travel or wandering and is sometimes accompanied by the establishment of a new identity. It is a facet of dissociative amnesia, according to the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5).

After recovery from a fugue state, previous memories usually return intact, and further treatment is unnecessary ... Fugues are precipitated by a series of long-term traumatic episodes.