Losing Ellie, my husband’s mother, was one of the most difficult things our family has experienced. Nothing, and I mean nothing, could have prepared us for her unexpected loss of life. What I have found is emotions stay. They don’t remain at the surface the way dried blood does as a scab to the skin. No, emotional wounds are different. All that […]
I Never Expected to Grieve for My Mother
Lined up in the garage as if they are expecting us still are the dining room chairs of my youth. In all, there are five. Yet now, as if in a dream, I see eight. Eight wood chairs—each pushed under an antique table that, if you were not seated in the middle where the leaves […]
Write What Haunts You
“Write what haunts you, lest you spend your life amidst drivel. Write what you care most about, the beauty, the absurdity, and the sorrow of the world.”–Jane Resh Thomas In the quiet of an unoccupied room I exhaled the words I’d just read in a whisper… “Write what haunts you…” Had you asked me prior to […]
Shepherding death; letting go of my mother
It was the sort of awakening that occurs when a phone’s ring interrupts a deep sleep–the kind that if needed, propels one into motion, only there was no phone ringing, I simply felt called. Less than 20 minutes later I was checking in with the night security guard at the hospital, as he handed […]
