With a blanket spread out on May’s green grass, my husband and I are finally idle. Balanced in between Friday and Sunday, in between household chores and calls to take care the body, we extract the essence of the moment. As the breeze pollinates me with the scent of spring flowers, he tells me about […]
Four days before this past Christmas, I went to my friend Alex’s memorial service. She died on December 17th after a three-and-a-half year battle with eye melanoma, and after living for two years longer than her doctors expected. A large hoop with ribbons dangling from it dazzled in the sunny doorway of the Glade Church, […]
Dear Goddess of the spreading starry skies … whose shawl is the northern lights … and whose shoes are the polar ice floes …. Lead us ever in circles … Don’t stop dancing with us … Should disastrous death try to cut in … like an asteroid tapping on your shoulder … keep whirling … […]
I haven’t listened to my John Mellencamp CD with the song “Your Life is Now” on it since right after my brother Danny died in 2001. One of my favorite last good memories of Dan was dancing to this 1998 CD with him and my sister Kathy. It was during a family Labor Day cook-out […]
The sadness is already there; the crying just lets it out. ~ Colleen – from the Jim and Dan Stories. I read through tears from the July copy of the Time magazine that my husband brought home from the eye doctor’s office. The cover, which read “How Your Siblings Make You Who You Are” by […]
The last time I played Scrabble with Alex it was late October. I don’t remember who won, but I do remember that she was out of breath from just sitting and playing and that by the time I was getting ready to leave she had already retired to the couch and had hooked herself up […]
The last few weeks of my brothers’ lives played out like the conclusion of a dramatic Hollywood script, a plot with a twist. The road trip they took, two weeks before the first death, became the beginning of a larger journey, the one in which they would both leave this world. ~ excerpt from the […]
After completing “The Jim and Dan Stories,” my writing didn’t abruptly stop, but the book had its own rhythm and timing and there came a point when the story was told. I continued to take notes and some stories came like aftershocks, too late to be included in the book. Soon, I put “The Jim […]
Remember when you were a kid and you made an ugly face and someone told you that you better watch out because your face could get stuck that way? I recently came across the following description of grief in my journal: Grief is like the heat it takes to soften metal. Yes, it hurts. Yes, […]
Death is a season rather than a single date. I hadn’t been home from the last funeral for even a week when the terrorist attacks on the U.S. took place–September 11, 2001. Two towers came down, one right after the other like my brothers did, killing over 3,000 innocent people. Now the whole country was […]
When someone close to you dies, you begin to look at life through the eyes they no longer have, or you find yourself doing things they loved to do because they no longer can. When I hear music that I know my brother Danny would have liked, I close my eyes and let it sink […]
My sisters and I have an unusual family trait. We remember events by what clothes we were wearing at the time. On the day my brother Dan’s doctor at St. Luke’s Hospital in Houston told me that Dan would not likely recover from the liver disease he was battling, I was wearing a short dungaree […]
