Think I’ve mentioned someplace on this site that sharing meals and cooking was always very important to my husband...it was also a big part of my mother’s life and one of the ways she showed affection and concern for those in her life, they were similar in many ways, including that one.  My husband used to tell people that he’d always “had trouble distinguishing food, love, and sex” — he’d say it in a joking way, but he really believed that in some way, at the deepest level, they were all…

Hello Morgan, Bluebird, Linda at al. I'm sorry it has been so awfully long since my last contact.  A Year? I have always read the posts, though and have felt the same horrible burning pain I have the last, nearly 5 years since Nancy left me. I have had a couple of tia's including a lengthy bout of "aphasia". It was almost comedic as I couldn't talk but kept trying to tell the emt's which hospital to drop me at. This year, I have…

A Stoic Response to Grief

“It is better to conquer our grief than to deceive it. For if it has withdrawn, being merely beguiled by pleasures and preoccupations, it starts up again and from its very respite gains force to savage us. But the grief that has been conquered by reason is calmed for ever. I am not therefore going to prescribe for you those remedies which I know many people have used, that you divert or cheer yourself by a long or pleasant journey…

I wrote this poem many years ago when my mother and my second mother, my mother-in-law, were both dying of cancer.  They died a week apart.  It was helpful to me then and is helpful to me now.  I hope it can be helpful for some of you.

Children of the Light

We are children of the light,

Burning crystals,

Each fracturing the light

Into his own incandescent dance of joy.

Blinded by our senses

We do not see the light that binds us.

Flames…

The widespread practice of a viewing of the body and wake at a funeral home is not helpful to me as it seems to be for so many people.  But I do need to say goodbye formally, in a memorial service.  As a person of faith, I prefer religious services; but some formal rite of farewell, some ritual recognition that a life has ended is still important, if the family is not religious.  It has always been important to mankind, and it is important to me.  My uncle wanted nothing, no service, no…

Moriturus

Edna St. Vincent Millay

If I could have

Two things in one:

The peace of the grave,

And the light of the sun;



My hands across

My thin breast-bone,

But aware of the moss

Invading the stone,



Aware of the flight

Of the golden flicker

With his wing to the light;

To hear him nicker



And drum with his bill

On the rotted…