After my mother died of glioblastoma, my dad placed the box of her ashes on the shelf above her electric piano. I couldn't look at it. Only around it. It seemed too small a container for her. A few months later, Dad received his own terminal diagnosis: AML. He started treatment, and he began to leave Mom offerings of her favorite infusion snack: Lorna Doones. That's what Mom snacked on during her Avastin drips, so that's what Dad asks for at his sessions. Now dozens of cookie packages sit atop the little wooden box that holds -- but cannot contain -- my mother. A cairn of shortbread for her.
I am so deep in the Bereft these days that I can't tell if I'm swimming or drowning. The water over my head feels the same. Dad is in a clinical trial about an hour and a half from our respective homes. The past month has been filled with only action verbs: teaching, driving, managing, mothering, helping. I am so tired. I keep wishing my mom was here. My bones ache with the missing.
On Friday, I dropped Dad off at the farm after an appointment. As I was leaving, I did my customary chant of "Mom, I miss you. Mom, I miss you." A litany of loss that I tell the farm as I'm leaving. But this time, a voice inside of me said, "Well, why don't you stop talking about it and come see me? You know where I am!"
My mother was the only person I know who had a twinkle in her eye AND her voice. No mistaking who was sassing me right then. So I didn't leave. Instead, I drove the car down the tractor trail to our back field. When I opened the door, early spring rushed in like floodwater.
Thawing mud. A hint of mint. Stubby fingers of green pushing up through tufts of dessicated field grass. The pure, piercing notes of robins and cardinals and red-wing blackbirds puncturing the air. Their voices tumbling over each other in variations of "I'm here. I'm here. It's time." A glorious birdsong madrigal -- silenced when the resident red-tailed hawk flew over them.
My mom's voice reminded me: she's never inside. She's always out here. My dad has his altar of Lorna Doones, and that comforts him. I have the back field and the change of seasons, and that comforts me. I think maybe a shrine is where your grief settles, but also where it lifts somehow. Maybe it's where you can put down some of the loss and pain you carry around with you. (Like a grief storage unit! Mine has air conditioning! No protection from the elements, but the rent is cheap!) I don't know how the mechanism works. I just felt tightness in my soul ease. Not totally -- but enough so I could keep on with the Doing. And I'm grateful for that.
Tierney! Absolutely stunning. My dad also died of glioblastoma. Craving a shortbread cookie and a brisk walk in the early spring air. Sending you love, wishing you many more moments of connection amidst the bird song. I hope you keep writing about this!
Whoa, what a beautiful passage you’ve written and shared with us, why, thank you! Grief has many many roads, paths that go from the primary, safe way, to the obscure tertiary one, in sometimes, in a matter of moments. I am completely in the know of that “doing” and it is still burned in my head & heart decades after my parents deaths. That “tired”, just never finds respite. It’s part of that love that is shared and intertwined that pulls you through. I love you go to your field to feel your Mom, it’s palpable in your words. I wish you strength and send you a hug & a prayer, it is all part of a lovelife and embrace the moments no matter how hard🙏🏼❤️💔☮️🙌🏼
Thank you for your sharing. I was able last week to finally look at, not around, the velvet bag holding my husband’s ashes on the buffet-he died three months ago. Maybe some month I will be able to take the beautiful wooden box we selected for him out of the bag and look at it.
You have found beauty in your grief. Your description of the field touched me. Breath deeply as you manage the care you give to your father and yourself.
Tierney, when you wrote, "she's never inside...she's always out here," it moved me so deeply. I am so very thankful, that you felt some ease from this "thing" that is called "grief" but is so much deeper than the word can express. We do not know eachother, but I am honored that you shared this beauty, here with us.
Grief is an individual journey. My mother passed peacefully in my home 4 years ago. She was 93. I miss her terribly, but I see her almost daily, wherever I may roam. Mom loved to fly, and when she saw a contrail she’d say “look Jane, where are we going today?” Today I’m on a train in Italy, and sure enough, out my window is a contrail, and my heart flutters as I quietly say ‘Hi Mom, I see you!’ 💞
As always, love your rich and layered reflection, one that captures not only the vulnerability of writing but the strange alchemy of letting a book go, of trusting that it will live beyond you. The act of recording an audiobook seems like the ultimate confrontation with one’s own work: no longer a silent communion with the page, but a voiced, embodied reckoning.
Your description of “dropping in” — of shifting from self-consciousness to a kind of trance — reminds me of musicians talking about flow, or actors speaking of the moment when they stop performing and start being. It’s also the paradox of writing itself: the moment of composition is intensely private, yet the ultimate goal is connection, a form of shared experience. Hearing your own words spoken back to you, syllable by syllable, seems like a deeply intimate and slightly terrifying mirror.
And oh, the typos. The ghostly little mistakes that escape all vigilance until it’s too late. It’s humbling, isn’t it? A reminder that books — like their authors — are living, breathing things, and that perfection is an illusion best abandoned in favor of the beautifully, humanly imperfect.
I love how you link this to Woolf’s yearning for the tactile pleasure of writing, the way a sentence “curves under the fingers.” There’s something sensual in that, the weight and texture of language made physical. And there’s something deeply poetic, too, in the idea that punctuation itself carries tone, rhythm, inflection — just as grief, perhaps, has its own grammar, its own syntax of loss and remembrance. As a writer, I do understand that.
Speaking of which — what a powerful way to introduce Carla Fernandez’s work. If writing a book is a process of grief and release, then “Renegade Grief” already sounds like a book that understands both the weight of sorrow and the necessity of letting go.
Brava, for both your book and for this wonderful reflection. May The Book of Alchemy find its rightful place in the hands, and ears, of those who need it most.
My mother died when I was 5, and was sick for several years prior. Goodbye was on the street when someone said wave, your mother is there pointing to a window. My brother and I thought that she was coming back until a neighbor said, "You are the Cancer kids". As adults, we found out that my father did not bury my mother my uncle did in his family plot. We visited the cemetery and saw the gravestone. Rose--devoted wife and mother. After all that how do you grieve? Well, my dead mother has tagged along with me. She lives in a few photo's-and of course my heart where she never left.
"...beautifully, humanly imperfect" I love that. As a recovering (sort of) perfectionist, I struggle with embracing the beauty in imperfection. Having pre-ordered The Alchemy, I now cannot wait for the audio book. I lost three family members (brother, father, and grandmother) when I was still in my twenties, and my mom when I was in my thirties. I felt grief as unrelenting and, due to the way they died, very complicated. When I write about it, I liken it to falling off a cliff, hitting ledges on the way down, and then hitting the bottom, stunned. But I roll over and stand up and pick up my pack and walk...the pack carrying the grief eventually lightened, but always carried. I am going to read Carla's book and I can't wait for yours, Suleika.
Grief wore me, like an unwanted covering. Last March, Mom died, and Dad, five days after her funeral. And so, I decided to wear "it." I donned Dad's field jacket (Army) and Mom's University of Illinois sweatshirt (she was the first and only to go to college in her family) at various times when the grief was debilitating. And I went forward, wearing their clothing, into a life where I was left feeling I knew so little and needing to show I still knew so much. ( I am a teacher of young children). And so, my grief is not relieved in a place, as my life, my entire life has been formed, sequenced, and marked, by place. Like Suleika, as I read to my students, as my mom read to me, I find that when I fall into place, the marks on the page become music, with rests, pauses, stops, gos, and for those moments, life is sweet. This surrender to the letting go, is relief. Thank you Suleika and Carla for these two moments of reflection.
I go back every year, near my birthday. A pilgrimage of sorts. Not to a shrine, not to a grave—just to the place that knew us both before time pressed in, before regret became a second skin.
The houses are different. The people are strangers. But the air—the air still holds us.
I walk past the old lot. I don’t stop, don’t stare, don’t linger too long, but I know it feels me passing. Knows the girl who once sat under the apricot tree, her knees dusted in soil soft as silk. The girl who bathed in a trough in the shed. The one who laughed too hard, fell from a table, sprained her arm but didn’t cry. That girl lived here.
Jim is long gone. So is my father—or maybe just the man he was before.
But I still buy the rum & raisin ice cream. His favourite. I let it melt on my tongue. I stand in the ocean like we used to, let it take me by the ankles, let it tell me that I am still here.
I walk the pier. I skim my fingers along the railing. I do not have to look down to know the fish are below, waiting.
Once, I tossed them back into the water when the fishermen weren’t looking. Or maybe they saw, & just let me. A child born under the sign of water—what else could she do?
Some people build altars. Some light candles. I return to the water.
The tide moves in. The tide moves out.
I let it pull at me. I let it remind me.
I am still here. We are still here.
The photograph of you in the recording booth—utterly luminous, lost in the act. I can’t wait to hear you smile when you read through that typo—after all, it is just a word running wild, too excited to wait its turn.
Hello All. Suleika I love the picture in todays Sunday's prompt. And the beautiful telling of your journey in the reading. I will now be excited to order to audiobook!! And the writing by Carla!! I work as a licensed professional counselor in grief and loss. And I love her work. And just bought her new book because of this ! Her Dinner Party for grief as resources has helped so many. I lost my late husband many years ago and value her work. Thank you.
My parents moved into my building a few years before my father’s death. My father loved to walk in Prospect Park and would go there almost every day. He had a favorite tree. I am fortunate enough to be able to go to Prospect Park as often as I would like. Every weekend day as long as I am not working I walk in the park and my husband runs there . We meet in the middle and continue circling the park together. I pass my father’s favorite tree every time I go to the park. After Dad died my aunt and uncle dedicated a bench in the park in his honor. I can sit on “his” bench whenever I feel like it though there are often people sitting on it already. In those cases I wait till they leave, give them looks or hint broadly that I would like them to move.
My father was a wonderful writer. I am very fortunate to have a large collection of his writings. Dad was a professor and wrote many academic books and articles . When he retired he began researching other topics that interested him and he wrote about those as well. In the last few years of his life my father wrote a blog about being an old man, being sick and dying. It appeared three times a week and he wrote his last post about a week before he died. He also wrote my brother and me letters every Saturday once we left home. He wrote to me even when even in his last few years when we lived in the same building. The letters usually arrived on Tuesdays. I looked forward to reading them. Even now thirteen years after his death I still expect to see one of his letters on Tuesdays.
A few years ago I discovered that I too love to write and I feel a closeness with my father when I do. I am so lucky to have a collection of my father’s letters dating from 1983-2012. I can read his letters, his blog posts and his books. I can walk in the park, look at his tree and sit on his bench. I can talk to him and tell him things that might interest him and he is always with me.
I love this so, so much. Because, yes, we only find the typos after the book is finished, printed, in our hands (this has happened to me, every single time), but the typos don't matter. The curl and the melody and the heart of the writer—that's what makes a book, that's what brings us, your readers, near, and oh, you have heart, and curl, and song. Language, in the end, rises above its rules. It breaks free, and so did you.
A yortzeit candle, the traditional Jewish way I was trained to create a grieving ritual, will be lit this Tuesday for my father who died in 1980. Like birthdays I have my parent’s day of death also etched in my calendar brain.
Thank you for all of this today. It feels like a gift. Although I am not young at 61, I am numbishly grieving my Mum, who died March 1st. She had covid at a few months shy of 99, and seemed to be improving until suddenly she wasn’t. Her last hours were suffering we could not fix… but at least we were able to put our other 2 siblings on the phone to say their goodbyes. That made Mum relax, and slip away. It was astonishing to watch. I hope she was able to meet with her parents, who she was visiting through her dementia-aided mind these past few months quite frequently. And our Dad—who died over 55 years ago—he’d be waiting for a dance and catch up on everyone. Ah well. It’s all part of life, this step as large as birth. It’s just so hard for those of us left behind.
Suleika, thank you. For your vibrant creativity & positivity, your generous community you have created. I look forward to your book I preordered here in Montreal. What a gift you share with us all. Thank you.
Oh, and our special place we are all drawn to since our grandparents built in the 1930s, is a lake up near Mont Tremblant in the laurentians. We still leave the car & travel by boat to the cabin. No electricity. Peaceful lake, woods. Our siblings have cottages, one our parents built. It is where we connect. All of us. ♥️ We’ll bring Mum’s ashes there.
I carry my altar with me. I wear prayer beads on my wrist, I am a walking altar. I need to pray or meditate, or talk out loud, many times a day. I need my altar.
Touching a tree, planting spring flowers, natures altar. Sitting in sunshine, reading a good book, heavens altar. Painting, touching paint and paper and brushes, arts altar. Holding my grandchildren, my mama altar.
Blessed am I , so grateful for the ability to stop, look, listen and pray. Music, will take me to my knees, and at my age, I do not care where that might be!!
My altar, I carry, ready for this thing we call life. Pay attention, love big, know when to let go, and hold on.
I’m sitting here typing, in the quiet altar of my home, it’s just a wonderful thing.
My life and my people have featured a lot of moves, and it has made physical sites of solace hard to establish. For several years, my mother carried the various boxes of our dogs’ ashes from home to home, intending to bury them but never quite feeling settled or confident enough to do so. When I found myself visiting my father on Fathers Day weekend and about an hours drive from the rural parish cemetery where my mothers father had been buried, I asked to borrow the car so I could go, say hi. My parents had been separated for several years; it was appropriate for my father not to come.
I mixed up a martini, my grandfather’s favorite drink, and drove out to a part of Wisconsin that had never had any role in my life until my grandfather passed and it was time to make use of a plot he had secured decades earlier in his first assignment as a minister. It was warm and gray, a storm sauntering in. Once I found the modest inlaid marker I took a seat. I didn’t know how to start. So I said, “Hi.” And began recounting the highlights of my life, which led to some sharing of concerns about the family and about the world. Eventually my words wound around to “I miss you” and “I wonder what you were like at my age” and “I wonder if we’d get along” and “thank you for what you taught me, I have been missing my good teachers.” Fat drops of rain started to fall so I took a sip of the martini and ceremonially dashed the rest over his grass. My own fat tears started to roll, and I took my whole wet self back to my father’s car as thunder began to drum the land.
I haven’t been back, but the visit gave me a sense of what grieving places can be. For starters, a place to think about the whole person, and the ways that they continue to live through us.
Over the years, I have found grie fhas become an intregal part of my life. With that has come different ways to live without my loved ones, and the awareness that I carry them with me, no matter how many years it has been. I began my journey to escape from grief in 1994 when I moved from upstate New York to central Florida on the gulf coast after my infant daughter died a week before her due date. I could no longer function in the world where the doctors and nurses had let that happen, at 42 but healthy and seeming much younger, the risks of my pregnancy were ignored. I left behind my beloved best friend, and many other friends, a job I loved but felt unable to do anymore, and all the connections of over 20 years. The journey and the transition were harsh and in many ways surreal, the environments, polar opposites. I went through the motions trying jobs I had never done, taking risks I wouldn't have in my right mind.
My husband at the time was not much support, and I had to rely on my own strength.
I found my place to mourn and heal by moving to the beach. I walked the shores of the gulf every afternoon after work, taking comfort from the ever-present waters, sparkling sun on the surface, the shorebirds, the changing sky, the setting sun, the happy people, busy children, and the gifts of shells, sponges, and other washed up treasures. In a few short years I would lose my mother, then my best friend at 47 to scleroderma, and my beloved sister at 49 to a brain aneurysm. By then, I had bought a house thanks to a first time buyers grant, divorced my husband and had a new life. I am a still just a few miles to the beach where I always find solace. Now, I have a yard which is an oasis, overreaching live oaks which gather around the house and yard like protective spirits. Sitting there brings me peace, closing my eyes and listening to the birds, I can picture all of them here with me. I also discovered the significance of "The Day of the Dead". I have created my own alter in the built in shelves in the corner of my Florida room/studio. The photos of my beloveds are there to look at whenever I want, as is the urn of my infant daughter, her ashes in the ocean. I write my journal entries to my sister for I have needed her all these years and refuse to give her up, like my mother and my friend, they come to me in my dreams.
After my mother died of glioblastoma, my dad placed the box of her ashes on the shelf above her electric piano. I couldn't look at it. Only around it. It seemed too small a container for her. A few months later, Dad received his own terminal diagnosis: AML. He started treatment, and he began to leave Mom offerings of her favorite infusion snack: Lorna Doones. That's what Mom snacked on during her Avastin drips, so that's what Dad asks for at his sessions. Now dozens of cookie packages sit atop the little wooden box that holds -- but cannot contain -- my mother. A cairn of shortbread for her.
I am so deep in the Bereft these days that I can't tell if I'm swimming or drowning. The water over my head feels the same. Dad is in a clinical trial about an hour and a half from our respective homes. The past month has been filled with only action verbs: teaching, driving, managing, mothering, helping. I am so tired. I keep wishing my mom was here. My bones ache with the missing.
On Friday, I dropped Dad off at the farm after an appointment. As I was leaving, I did my customary chant of "Mom, I miss you. Mom, I miss you." A litany of loss that I tell the farm as I'm leaving. But this time, a voice inside of me said, "Well, why don't you stop talking about it and come see me? You know where I am!"
My mother was the only person I know who had a twinkle in her eye AND her voice. No mistaking who was sassing me right then. So I didn't leave. Instead, I drove the car down the tractor trail to our back field. When I opened the door, early spring rushed in like floodwater.
Thawing mud. A hint of mint. Stubby fingers of green pushing up through tufts of dessicated field grass. The pure, piercing notes of robins and cardinals and red-wing blackbirds puncturing the air. Their voices tumbling over each other in variations of "I'm here. I'm here. It's time." A glorious birdsong madrigal -- silenced when the resident red-tailed hawk flew over them.
My mom's voice reminded me: she's never inside. She's always out here. My dad has his altar of Lorna Doones, and that comforts him. I have the back field and the change of seasons, and that comforts me. I think maybe a shrine is where your grief settles, but also where it lifts somehow. Maybe it's where you can put down some of the loss and pain you carry around with you. (Like a grief storage unit! Mine has air conditioning! No protection from the elements, but the rent is cheap!) I don't know how the mechanism works. I just felt tightness in my soul ease. Not totally -- but enough so I could keep on with the Doing. And I'm grateful for that.
This resonates so much, Tierney—and your writing is so so beautiful. Thank you for sharing it with us ❤️
“Like a grief storage unit..”….what a wonderful image. And what a wonderful piece to share with all of us. Godspeed to you.
Tierney! Absolutely stunning. My dad also died of glioblastoma. Craving a shortbread cookie and a brisk walk in the early spring air. Sending you love, wishing you many more moments of connection amidst the bird song. I hope you keep writing about this!
Whoa, what a beautiful passage you’ve written and shared with us, why, thank you! Grief has many many roads, paths that go from the primary, safe way, to the obscure tertiary one, in sometimes, in a matter of moments. I am completely in the know of that “doing” and it is still burned in my head & heart decades after my parents deaths. That “tired”, just never finds respite. It’s part of that love that is shared and intertwined that pulls you through. I love you go to your field to feel your Mom, it’s palpable in your words. I wish you strength and send you a hug & a prayer, it is all part of a lovelife and embrace the moments no matter how hard🙏🏼❤️💔☮️🙌🏼
Thank you for your sharing. I was able last week to finally look at, not around, the velvet bag holding my husband’s ashes on the buffet-he died three months ago. Maybe some month I will be able to take the beautiful wooden box we selected for him out of the bag and look at it.
You have found beauty in your grief. Your description of the field touched me. Breath deeply as you manage the care you give to your father and yourself.
This is beautiful, thank you for sharing. Sending you warm wishes for strength.
This is beautiful Tierney.
The "Thawing Mud " paragraph put me right there in that fabulous space. All 5 of my senses were participating. Beautiful piece.
Tierney, reading your essay was a privilege—thank you for sharing your heart.
So beautiful, Tierney! <3
I loved this piece, Tierney. Thank you.
I think it’s fascinating where people’s spirits reside, where we find them, connect with them, honor them.
Tierney, when you wrote, "she's never inside...she's always out here," it moved me so deeply. I am so very thankful, that you felt some ease from this "thing" that is called "grief" but is so much deeper than the word can express. We do not know eachother, but I am honored that you shared this beauty, here with us.
Grief is an individual journey. My mother passed peacefully in my home 4 years ago. She was 93. I miss her terribly, but I see her almost daily, wherever I may roam. Mom loved to fly, and when she saw a contrail she’d say “look Jane, where are we going today?” Today I’m on a train in Italy, and sure enough, out my window is a contrail, and my heart flutters as I quietly say ‘Hi Mom, I see you!’ 💞
💕💕💕
As always, love your rich and layered reflection, one that captures not only the vulnerability of writing but the strange alchemy of letting a book go, of trusting that it will live beyond you. The act of recording an audiobook seems like the ultimate confrontation with one’s own work: no longer a silent communion with the page, but a voiced, embodied reckoning.
Your description of “dropping in” — of shifting from self-consciousness to a kind of trance — reminds me of musicians talking about flow, or actors speaking of the moment when they stop performing and start being. It’s also the paradox of writing itself: the moment of composition is intensely private, yet the ultimate goal is connection, a form of shared experience. Hearing your own words spoken back to you, syllable by syllable, seems like a deeply intimate and slightly terrifying mirror.
And oh, the typos. The ghostly little mistakes that escape all vigilance until it’s too late. It’s humbling, isn’t it? A reminder that books — like their authors — are living, breathing things, and that perfection is an illusion best abandoned in favor of the beautifully, humanly imperfect.
I love how you link this to Woolf’s yearning for the tactile pleasure of writing, the way a sentence “curves under the fingers.” There’s something sensual in that, the weight and texture of language made physical. And there’s something deeply poetic, too, in the idea that punctuation itself carries tone, rhythm, inflection — just as grief, perhaps, has its own grammar, its own syntax of loss and remembrance. As a writer, I do understand that.
Speaking of which — what a powerful way to introduce Carla Fernandez’s work. If writing a book is a process of grief and release, then “Renegade Grief” already sounds like a book that understands both the weight of sorrow and the necessity of letting go.
Brava, for both your book and for this wonderful reflection. May The Book of Alchemy find its rightful place in the hands, and ears, of those who need it most.
Thank you Tamara! We are indeed LETTING IT GO over here! 😬
My mother died when I was 5, and was sick for several years prior. Goodbye was on the street when someone said wave, your mother is there pointing to a window. My brother and I thought that she was coming back until a neighbor said, "You are the Cancer kids". As adults, we found out that my father did not bury my mother my uncle did in his family plot. We visited the cemetery and saw the gravestone. Rose--devoted wife and mother. After all that how do you grieve? Well, my dead mother has tagged along with me. She lives in a few photo's-and of course my heart where she never left.
Oh, Mae—what a moment held in so few words. The weight of goodbye, the distance, the gesture.
Cheersing to Rose today. Thanks Mae.
"...beautifully, humanly imperfect" I love that. As a recovering (sort of) perfectionist, I struggle with embracing the beauty in imperfection. Having pre-ordered The Alchemy, I now cannot wait for the audio book. I lost three family members (brother, father, and grandmother) when I was still in my twenties, and my mom when I was in my thirties. I felt grief as unrelenting and, due to the way they died, very complicated. When I write about it, I liken it to falling off a cliff, hitting ledges on the way down, and then hitting the bottom, stunned. But I roll over and stand up and pick up my pack and walk...the pack carrying the grief eventually lightened, but always carried. I am going to read Carla's book and I can't wait for yours, Suleika.
“But I roll over and stand up and pick up my pack and walk…” ❤️
Thank you Linda!
Grief wore me, like an unwanted covering. Last March, Mom died, and Dad, five days after her funeral. And so, I decided to wear "it." I donned Dad's field jacket (Army) and Mom's University of Illinois sweatshirt (she was the first and only to go to college in her family) at various times when the grief was debilitating. And I went forward, wearing their clothing, into a life where I was left feeling I knew so little and needing to show I still knew so much. ( I am a teacher of young children). And so, my grief is not relieved in a place, as my life, my entire life has been formed, sequenced, and marked, by place. Like Suleika, as I read to my students, as my mom read to me, I find that when I fall into place, the marks on the page become music, with rests, pauses, stops, gos, and for those moments, life is sweet. This surrender to the letting go, is relief. Thank you Suleika and Carla for these two moments of reflection.
And thank YOU Mary, for this beautiful reflection. ❤️
Thank you, Heather.
Beautiful reflection, Mary!
Thank you, Carla.
I go back every year, near my birthday. A pilgrimage of sorts. Not to a shrine, not to a grave—just to the place that knew us both before time pressed in, before regret became a second skin.
The houses are different. The people are strangers. But the air—the air still holds us.
I walk past the old lot. I don’t stop, don’t stare, don’t linger too long, but I know it feels me passing. Knows the girl who once sat under the apricot tree, her knees dusted in soil soft as silk. The girl who bathed in a trough in the shed. The one who laughed too hard, fell from a table, sprained her arm but didn’t cry. That girl lived here.
Jim is long gone. So is my father—or maybe just the man he was before.
But I still buy the rum & raisin ice cream. His favourite. I let it melt on my tongue. I stand in the ocean like we used to, let it take me by the ankles, let it tell me that I am still here.
I walk the pier. I skim my fingers along the railing. I do not have to look down to know the fish are below, waiting.
Once, I tossed them back into the water when the fishermen weren’t looking. Or maybe they saw, & just let me. A child born under the sign of water—what else could she do?
Some people build altars. Some light candles. I return to the water.
The tide moves in. The tide moves out.
I let it pull at me. I let it remind me.
I am still here. We are still here.
The photograph of you in the recording booth—utterly luminous, lost in the act. I can’t wait to hear you smile when you read through that typo—after all, it is just a word running wild, too excited to wait its turn.
I know a place like this...it used to bring me so much peace...inclusive of rum raisin ice cream...STX
too excited to wait its turn——****
indeed, these little words have places to be.
Beautiful, Kim! Thanks for sharing. Apricot trees and rum & raisin ice cream and the water's edge - such rich details of your life in here.
And I thank you, Carla. For tracing the architecture of grief, for showing how memory etches itself into places—some we choose, some that choose us.
Thank you.
Grief is a love song
Death the unraveller
Stripped down to the bone
We see we are stardust —-
Never alone
All- Soul Earth travellers.
I sooooooooooo wish you could come to Canada with an Alchemy tour . We so love our neighbours .(:
Lovely, tender poem. Thank you. And despite what you are seeing otherwise, we love our northern neighbors, too.
I feel the love. Back up to you, Oh Northern Light.
Hello All. Suleika I love the picture in todays Sunday's prompt. And the beautiful telling of your journey in the reading. I will now be excited to order to audiobook!! And the writing by Carla!! I work as a licensed professional counselor in grief and loss. And I love her work. And just bought her new book because of this ! Her Dinner Party for grief as resources has helped so many. I lost my late husband many years ago and value her work. Thank you.
Thanks Gina! Hope Renegade Grief sparks some goodness for you and your clients!
I have told all I know about your book today !! Looking forward to it. With much gratitude to you.
My parents moved into my building a few years before my father’s death. My father loved to walk in Prospect Park and would go there almost every day. He had a favorite tree. I am fortunate enough to be able to go to Prospect Park as often as I would like. Every weekend day as long as I am not working I walk in the park and my husband runs there . We meet in the middle and continue circling the park together. I pass my father’s favorite tree every time I go to the park. After Dad died my aunt and uncle dedicated a bench in the park in his honor. I can sit on “his” bench whenever I feel like it though there are often people sitting on it already. In those cases I wait till they leave, give them looks or hint broadly that I would like them to move.
My father was a wonderful writer. I am very fortunate to have a large collection of his writings. Dad was a professor and wrote many academic books and articles . When he retired he began researching other topics that interested him and he wrote about those as well. In the last few years of his life my father wrote a blog about being an old man, being sick and dying. It appeared three times a week and he wrote his last post about a week before he died. He also wrote my brother and me letters every Saturday once we left home. He wrote to me even when even in his last few years when we lived in the same building. The letters usually arrived on Tuesdays. I looked forward to reading them. Even now thirteen years after his death I still expect to see one of his letters on Tuesdays.
A few years ago I discovered that I too love to write and I feel a closeness with my father when I do. I am so lucky to have a collection of my father’s letters dating from 1983-2012. I can read his letters, his blog posts and his books. I can walk in the park, look at his tree and sit on his bench. I can talk to him and tell him things that might interest him and he is always with me.
His bench and his letters—what perfect altars ❤️❤️
I love this so, so much. Because, yes, we only find the typos after the book is finished, printed, in our hands (this has happened to me, every single time), but the typos don't matter. The curl and the melody and the heart of the writer—that's what makes a book, that's what brings us, your readers, near, and oh, you have heart, and curl, and song. Language, in the end, rises above its rules. It breaks free, and so did you.
A yortzeit candle, the traditional Jewish way I was trained to create a grieving ritual, will be lit this Tuesday for my father who died in 1980. Like birthdays I have my parent’s day of death also etched in my calendar brain.
The yortzeit tradition is so simple, elegant, beautiful. Thanks for sharing!
Thank you for all of this today. It feels like a gift. Although I am not young at 61, I am numbishly grieving my Mum, who died March 1st. She had covid at a few months shy of 99, and seemed to be improving until suddenly she wasn’t. Her last hours were suffering we could not fix… but at least we were able to put our other 2 siblings on the phone to say their goodbyes. That made Mum relax, and slip away. It was astonishing to watch. I hope she was able to meet with her parents, who she was visiting through her dementia-aided mind these past few months quite frequently. And our Dad—who died over 55 years ago—he’d be waiting for a dance and catch up on everyone. Ah well. It’s all part of life, this step as large as birth. It’s just so hard for those of us left behind.
Suleika, thank you. For your vibrant creativity & positivity, your generous community you have created. I look forward to your book I preordered here in Montreal. What a gift you share with us all. Thank you.
Sending love and prayers for peace and comfort, Sarah ❤️
Thank you Suleika, much appreciated. As are you … trying to find bright spots, this Hatch is a special one for many of us.
Oh, and our special place we are all drawn to since our grandparents built in the 1930s, is a lake up near Mont Tremblant in the laurentians. We still leave the car & travel by boat to the cabin. No electricity. Peaceful lake, woods. Our siblings have cottages, one our parents built. It is where we connect. All of us. ♥️ We’ll bring Mum’s ashes there.
I carry my altar with me. I wear prayer beads on my wrist, I am a walking altar. I need to pray or meditate, or talk out loud, many times a day. I need my altar.
Touching a tree, planting spring flowers, natures altar. Sitting in sunshine, reading a good book, heavens altar. Painting, touching paint and paper and brushes, arts altar. Holding my grandchildren, my mama altar.
Blessed am I , so grateful for the ability to stop, look, listen and pray. Music, will take me to my knees, and at my age, I do not care where that might be!!
My altar, I carry, ready for this thing we call life. Pay attention, love big, know when to let go, and hold on.
I’m sitting here typing, in the quiet altar of my home, it’s just a wonderful thing.
My life and my people have featured a lot of moves, and it has made physical sites of solace hard to establish. For several years, my mother carried the various boxes of our dogs’ ashes from home to home, intending to bury them but never quite feeling settled or confident enough to do so. When I found myself visiting my father on Fathers Day weekend and about an hours drive from the rural parish cemetery where my mothers father had been buried, I asked to borrow the car so I could go, say hi. My parents had been separated for several years; it was appropriate for my father not to come.
I mixed up a martini, my grandfather’s favorite drink, and drove out to a part of Wisconsin that had never had any role in my life until my grandfather passed and it was time to make use of a plot he had secured decades earlier in his first assignment as a minister. It was warm and gray, a storm sauntering in. Once I found the modest inlaid marker I took a seat. I didn’t know how to start. So I said, “Hi.” And began recounting the highlights of my life, which led to some sharing of concerns about the family and about the world. Eventually my words wound around to “I miss you” and “I wonder what you were like at my age” and “I wonder if we’d get along” and “thank you for what you taught me, I have been missing my good teachers.” Fat drops of rain started to fall so I took a sip of the martini and ceremonially dashed the rest over his grass. My own fat tears started to roll, and I took my whole wet self back to my father’s car as thunder began to drum the land.
I haven’t been back, but the visit gave me a sense of what grieving places can be. For starters, a place to think about the whole person, and the ways that they continue to live through us.
Brilliant. Thank you, Eleanor.
Eleanor, Tearing up reading about your rain-drenched, thunder storm, martini conversation with your grandfather. Thanks for sharing! 🍸
Over the years, I have found grie fhas become an intregal part of my life. With that has come different ways to live without my loved ones, and the awareness that I carry them with me, no matter how many years it has been. I began my journey to escape from grief in 1994 when I moved from upstate New York to central Florida on the gulf coast after my infant daughter died a week before her due date. I could no longer function in the world where the doctors and nurses had let that happen, at 42 but healthy and seeming much younger, the risks of my pregnancy were ignored. I left behind my beloved best friend, and many other friends, a job I loved but felt unable to do anymore, and all the connections of over 20 years. The journey and the transition were harsh and in many ways surreal, the environments, polar opposites. I went through the motions trying jobs I had never done, taking risks I wouldn't have in my right mind.
My husband at the time was not much support, and I had to rely on my own strength.
I found my place to mourn and heal by moving to the beach. I walked the shores of the gulf every afternoon after work, taking comfort from the ever-present waters, sparkling sun on the surface, the shorebirds, the changing sky, the setting sun, the happy people, busy children, and the gifts of shells, sponges, and other washed up treasures. In a few short years I would lose my mother, then my best friend at 47 to scleroderma, and my beloved sister at 49 to a brain aneurysm. By then, I had bought a house thanks to a first time buyers grant, divorced my husband and had a new life. I am a still just a few miles to the beach where I always find solace. Now, I have a yard which is an oasis, overreaching live oaks which gather around the house and yard like protective spirits. Sitting there brings me peace, closing my eyes and listening to the birds, I can picture all of them here with me. I also discovered the significance of "The Day of the Dead". I have created my own alter in the built in shelves in the corner of my Florida room/studio. The photos of my beloveds are there to look at whenever I want, as is the urn of my infant daughter, her ashes in the ocean. I write my journal entries to my sister for I have needed her all these years and refuse to give her up, like my mother and my friend, they come to me in my dreams.
Such a beautiful image—oaks standing watch, a yard cradled in their quiet protection. A true oasis, Sheila.