MIDDLEBURY — Otter Creek Poets and End of Life Services, the organization formed when Hospice Volunteer Services and Addison Respite Care Home merged, have organized a celebration of the life and work of Mary Oliver on Wednesday, Feb. 13, from 4:30-5:30 p.m. in the Community Room at Eastview in Middlebury.
There are many in the community who are grieving the death of Oliver, a beloved poet who has tickled with us with her animal antics, stunned us with visions of the natural world, and brought us through the heights of love and the depths of loss. She is the one who told us in “When Death Comes”:
 
When it’s over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
 
“It is in community that we build our safe bridges, witness one another’s sadness and honor the spirits that carry us through a lifetime of challenges and joys,” says Laurie Borden, Program Director of End of Life Services.
“At times, grief can wash over us like a tsunami. We feel loss like a vast abyss — dark, deep, frightening and endless,” She adds. “And then we try to build safe bridges from happy memories to the painful absences, just to acknowledge there is life and death, and we exist in the completeness of that truth. As Oliver so aptly continued in her verse — ‘I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.’”
Join in this informal gathering to share in the legacy of Oliver. It is free and open to all. For more information call End of Life Services at 388-4111.