GLIMPSE THE HALF

Almost a year to the date of the anniversary of her daughter’s death, Ev Stransky woke up in the middle of the night realizing her daughter had just sent her something that became the basis for a book she wrote.
“I woke up at 2 o’clock in the morning with a line that went through my head: ‘If per chance you cast upon an angel’s wing’,” said Stransky, who has been writing poetry since she was a youngster. Fighting the urge to go back to sleep, Stransky decided to get up and sat down at the kitchen table to write a poem.
Stransky quickly learned she wasn’t writing the poem, but rather it was coming directly from her daughter Dawn, who died in November 2012. “It just keeps rolling and rolling out of me. It just flowed out of me,” Stransky says. “I realized Dawn sent it to me and she was talking to me.”
The poetry writer said she had to battle the temptation to change the first line, but something came over her and told her it’s right the way it is. “I thought it’s 3 o’clock in the morning and I’m not going to argue and change it,” Stransky said.
The story gets even more interesting.
The next morning at Bible study Stransky was telling a friend about “this crazy poem” she wrote during the night. Her friend told her about a single winged angel sculpture on display in Eau Claire, Wis. Stransky immediately got teary-eyed because her daughter went to college in Eau Claire and would have known about the angel.
Stransky did a little investigating and quickly came into contact with the sculptor from Indiana that made the angel, which took a year to build. He offered to sell the sculpture to Stransky because he believed it belonged in Owatonna. There was only one problem. Stransky couldn’t afford it, and she had no idea where it could go.
She ended up making a pitch to the Owatonna Hospital Foundation where she was given exactly 10 minutes to give a presentation about the statute. “I couldn’t possibly tell this story in 10 minutes,” Stransky recalls. She wrote down ahead of time exactly what needed to be said in the first half and then focused on why it would be appropriate at the Owatonna hospital in the last half.
Her pitch apparently touched board members. By the end of the day, she not only got authorization for the statute to be placed at the hospital, but the foundation also offered to pay for it.
Not only does the angel statute adorn the campus of the hospital, but it also provided the cover image for Stransky’s poem book. The first poem in the book is the one provided to Stransky by her daughter regarding the angel.
Stransky, 72, dedicates the book to parents who have experienced the death of children. “We know life is joy and sorrow; these pages embrace them both,” she writes in the book.
Her daughter died from complications of clinical depression just before her 37th birthday. Stransky said she had been fighting depression for most of her adult life. She was in the process of obtaining her nursing degree and most likely would have worked at the Owatonna hospital.
Since Stransky’s book was published in 2018, she has sold approximately 700 books. She has a limited number of books left. She said it became daunting for her once she realized there are more than 83,000 poetry books on Amazon and did not have a publisher.
As she read some of the poems from the book out loud to this writer, she began choking up with tears of sadness. The book contains poems written about three different families whose children left this world before their parents.
“I don’t know how anyone can get through losing a child that doesn’t have a solid foundation of faith,” Stransky says. “There has to be a higher power involved. I totally believe God is in charge of my life. Everything in life happens for a reason.”
Stransky began writing poetry in fifth grade while growing up on a dairy farm near Farmington. One day she went home, laid down on the carpet and wrote a poem for class. Her teacher responded in anger by accusing her of plagiarism and gave her a F on the poem. She went home in tears to her mother who quickly came to her defense and set the teacher straight. The teacher changed her grade to A.
“I’ve kept that poem with me in my purse for over 40 years,” Stransky said. “It was the beginning of my use of poetry to help me walk my life in harmony with myself and attempt to make sense of the world around me,” she added.
For Stransky, poetry matters. “Many times poetry has probably replaced Prozac in my attempts to face sorrow and help it move on,” she confides. “In moments of overwhelming joy, poetry has given a voice to thanksgiving. And those times when my world was too complicated, poetry has served me well as a ship navigating a rowdy sea.”
She is most moved to write poetry when there are major events happening in the world. Some of them have included: Susan Smith drowning her two boys, the death of the Kennedys, Martin L. King, Jr. and Princess Diana, the space shuttle disaster, Hurricane Katrina and 9/11.
“When these things happen, something bursts open inside of me and I have to write about those events,” Stransky said.
Asked which one is her favorite poem, Stransky smiled and replied: “That’s like me asking you which one of your kids you like the most.”