“I Am!”

“I Am!” is the poem Nic proposes for Elfrieda Von Riesen’s gravestone, and its consideration turns a practical memorial decision into a debate about grief, psychiatric history, gender, and the meanings imposed on the dead. The poem’s lines offer an image of rest beneath the grass and sky, but its author’s history and the associations attached to poets who died by suicide make the family hesitate. They do not settle on a final inscription in this exchange; instead, the poem’s central image survives as a possibility even as they consider leaving the stone blank apart from Elfrieda’s name and dates.

The poem and the proposed inscription

As Christmas approaches, Nic says he will join the family and calls from Winnipeg with an idea for Elfrieda’s headstone. He proposes lines beginning, “And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,” and ending, “The grass below; above, the vaulted sky.” The excerpt imagines the dead speaker lying in a place bounded by earth below and open sky above. Its measured, consoling language offers a possible form for the family’s wish to memorialize Elfrieda without reducing her life to the circumstances of her death.

Yolandi does not immediately recognize the verse. Nic identifies its author as John Clare, and when she asks whether Elfrieda liked him, Nic says she liked him very much. He identifies the poem as “I Am!” and adds that Clare wrote it in a mental asylum. The detail links the proposed inscription to an institution resembling the kind of setting from which Elfrieda’s own recent circumstances cannot be separated. A poem that might otherwise sound like a quiet expression of rest therefore arrives with a difficult history attached.

A memorial and its associations

The family’s hesitation is not simply about whether the poem is beautiful or whether Elfrieda admired its author. Nic says he dislikes the asylum connotations. He also thinks that if the headstone names a poet, it should be a woman. That preference opens another complication: he observes that many of the great women poets killed themselves, giving the alternative its own troubling associations. The proposed inscription thus gathers several meanings the family does not want to attach automatically to Elfrieda: institutional confinement, literary identity, and suicide.

Nic makes the concern explicit when he says they are trying to avoid labeling Elfrieda even after death. The question is not whether any single association is false, but whether an inscription would turn one aspect of a person into the public explanation of her life. The discussion places the headstone at the boundary between remembrance and interpretation. A literary quotation could preserve something Elfrieda loved, yet it could also direct later readers toward an identity or history the family does not wish to make definitive.

What remains unsettled

The exchange moves between choosing a poem and leaving the stone without one. Nic asks whether that means a blank stone; Yolandi considers the possibility of putting only Elfrieda’s name and dates. Their tentative language does not establish a final decision. It records the uncertainty itself: even a memorial intended to express love may risk speaking too conclusively for the person it commemorates.

Nic’s proposal also carries the pressure of events beyond the inscription. He says he should have fought harder to keep Elfrieda in the hospital, and Yolandi tells him he could not have fought harder. Against that painful retrospective judgment, the conversation about the gravestone does not offer a resolution or erase responsibility. It gives Nic and Yolandi a concrete, limited decision to consider while grief remains active: what, if anything, should be written on the stone.

The poem’s surviving image

Although the family questions the poem’s associations, its closing image continues to hold the conversation. Nic suggests that the original idea still holds in a way, then returns to the wish to be allowed to lie beneath the grass and vaulted sky. The image can be separated, at least provisionally, from the labels that make the full quotation difficult. It becomes less a settled explanation of Elfrieda than a possible expression of rest, offered with hesitation.

The unresolved choice gives “I Am!” its significance in this episode. The poem is not simply selected as an epitaph, nor is it rejected without remainder. Its author’s institutional history and the discussion of women poets who died by suicide expose the risks of making a memorial carry more than the family intends. At the same time, the lines’ final landscape persists after the debate turns toward a name and dates alone. The episode leaves both possibilities open: a grave marker restrained enough not to define Elfrieda, and a poetic image that still helps the family imagine her beneath the grass and sky.