The ghosts of Christmas past Wandered by my tree just now A cup of tea in hand, I stopped To admire the sweetness of the nearly trimmed tree And there you were My Mommy and Daddy Young and shiny, hopeful as when On Christmas morning I’d open the presents You’d saved to buy.
I love the holidays with all my heart. I wait all year, anticipatory as a child, to be able to play Christmas carols without apologies. Truth is, from November through New Year’s, my life takes on an incandescence undreamed of in the rest of my work-a-day year. Music, decorations, lights, tinsel, a lifetime’s worth of [ Read More ]
I was blessed with a family of great and merry women, who were kind enough to live into their 90s (one to 105!) so I could enjoy their wisdom, laughter and strength for much of my life… and also learn how to make great pies! I know we can’t recreate the best of our past [ Read More ]
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 ]
When my daughter died, I couldn’t find the strength to say the words aloud. Passed away, I could manage, as if she still hovered somewhere just outside my reach. Died was final and irrevocable and I simply could not say the word. The first few weeks after her death were a haze of grief. A [ 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 ]