I had a conversation with my dear 93 year old Aunt Helen shortly before she died, about how good the old days really were. Memories of my grandmother’s home-baked bread, of family gatherings, home and hearth and love and laughter, cuddling us both in remembered grace, were like a feather comforter for the spirit. “Life [ Read More ]
When your worst nightmare comes to pass a second time, a bizarre numbness sets in to keep you alive. When my daughter Bronwyn died, six years after her sister’s death, I simply went underground and for two months did nothing but try to live through it. I couldn’t write or even talk about my loss, [ Read More ]
“You don’t get to choose how you’re going to die. Or when. You can decide how you’re going to live now.” —Joan Baez, Folksinger When my daughter died at thirty-five, in the midst of my grief, I had an irrational recurrent guilt that I hadn’t bought her more hot fudge sundaes. She loved them so, [ Read More ]
Losing a child is a special kind of grief, irrevocably out of sync with nature. We’re not supposed to bury our children — the mind and heart rebel and struggle to find a place to contain the unbearable and unthinkable. We give birth to infinite love when we give birth to our children. Joy, hope, [ Read More ]
My mother could foretell death. She’d inherited the family banshee, the Irish harbinger who shrieks her fatal message to one member of each generation to let them know that someone is about to die. “What a pity about John,” she might say, “he’ll be gone by June 15th,” and close family members knew enough not [ Read More ]
Because she didn’t understand that love was meant to be soft and warm, but she intended to be loving, nonetheless, my mother gave from her brain, instead of her heart. I believe her heart had been battered shut in childhood by a tyrannical father and ineffectual mother, but her mind was limitless and her teaching [ Read More ]
I had a vision, shortly after my daughter died, in which I saw her standing on a great plain of Light, through which a Golden Road traveled towards Infinity. She stood solemnly, awaiting a command to move on – with Dakota and me standing like sentinels, one on either side. She said we mustn’t set [ Read More ]
I’ve studied and worked in many areas of alternative medicine over the past 25 years. Between my daughters’ terrible illnesses and that of others I’ve striven to heal, I expect I’ve seen nearly as much sickness and suffering as most physicians. In the process, I’ve come to know that illness wears a thousand masks and [ Read More ]
My parents read to me and to each other, a spectacular gift that rings in me still. It was poetry for the most part — and I loved it so much I never went to bed a night without memorizing a poem, or at least a group of verses. If the poem was lengthy like [ Read More ]
By the grace of God and a fast outfield, I find myself the mother of a 21 year old, born so many years after my first two daughters, it might as well be considered a separate lifetime Dakota is perched on the precarious edge of womanhood now, and she’s a deep one, never precipitous in [ Read More ]