Grief is a strange thing

/
Grief is a strange thing

People come and go like leaves on a tree. To try and avoid that loss only makes you avoid true happiness. We die. But as Snoopy always says, on the rest of the days you live... you only die ONE of the days. I always loved that. Grief can be a good thing if you let it in. When you don't argue with it like a drunk husband, much good can come from its stillness. —Jann Arden

Read More

How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting

/
How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting

She laughs lightly in that social way. She is older now, and so am I. I don't want to think about how criminally, absurdedly cruel she was to me when my baby died. I don't want to recall, as I'm sitting here across from her, all the forcible bootstrap-pulling. Grief was superceded, upended, re-formed. Grief became compost, making the earth stinky and rich, and from it new things emerged and became green. I feel love, longing, but not upset. Not anymore. I watch her face. My Relic revs his engine and scowls from underneath his toque.

Read More

The day after mother's day

/

We're all so different—from different places, and with different backstories. Different things led to this loss for me than for you. Some of us are ten days out. For others it's been ten years. Post-grief, we've picked up and let go a jumble of subsequent disappointments, joys, achievements, and gauntlets. There's a shorthand to shared experience that crosses everything that would otherwise make us strangers. 

Read More

Stray cat sings back

/
Stray cat sings back

Nine years later, there’s peace. There really is. People say Time heals and you fantasize about Wile E. Coyote anvils dropping from the sky. What’s-her-name and her however-many Stages of Grief. Denial, begging, anger, acceptance, a neat bow, something-something whatever. Screw you, what’s-your-name. My grief is not linear. But here’s the thing. From a long way up—I’m whispering now—it is, sort of. Grief is not linear. Time doesn’t heal. Not at all. Until it does.

Read More