Poet of the pandemic

An alumna’s experiences with change, grief and healing helped her touch a worldwide nerve through this crisis

By Tracy Staedter

Attitude is everything. You can whine, you can complain, you can fight, or you can look for the gift.”

The gift, says Kitty O’Meara, Sp ’77, is an invitation to “plumb your own spiritual depths.”

This philosophy carried O’Meara through career changes, the deaths of
her parents and an autoimmune disease. When Wisconsin’s stay-at-home orders began in March, O’Meara, retired and living with husband Phillip Hagedorn near Madison, accepted the gift to write.

She crafted the poem In the Time of the Pandemic and posted it to Facebook and her blog, The Daily Round. Its themes of reflection, healing and collective renewal resonated deeply with readers. Within a week, New Age author Deepak Chopra, M.D., had posted it to his page. O, The Oprah Magazine lauded O’Meara as “the poet laureate of the pandemic.” And artists ranging from Grammy-award winning composer John Corigliano to the Gabriel Alegria Afro-Peruvian Sextet requested permission to recite the poem or turn it into a song, dance, painting and more. “It touched a lot of unconscious yearning,” she says.

For O’Meara, who turned the poem into a children’s book, these themes have echoed across her life. After working in advertising and teaching middle school, she became a health care and hospice chaplain, growing familiar with grief and loss — and healing too. Repeatedly, she saw healing come from the difficult choice to let go of old ways and open up to something new. So it is, she says, for coping with life-altering events. “We don’t have the language for things like this. We turn to our dreams and prayers and metaphor and symbol — those become the key ways to communicate what’s happening.”

Read “In the Time of the Pandemic,” at O’Meara’s blog, The Daily Round
@ bit.ly/pandemicpoet.