Death is like an arrow that is already in flight, and your life lasts only until it reaches you. ~ George Hermes Is every grieving the death of a loved one different? Or are we different each time a loss visits us? When my brothers, Jim and Dan, died 4 years ago, I felt like […]
How does a part of the world leave the world? How does wetness leave water? ~ Rumi I’m reading Joan Didion’s book, “The Year of Magical Thinking,” which is about the sudden death of her husband while their only child was hospitalized and gravely ill. When my brothers, Jim and Dan, died four years […]
May the road rise up to meet you. May the wind always be at your back. May the sun shine warm upon your face, and rains fall soft upon your fields. And until we meet again, May God hold you in the palm of His hand. ~ Old Irish Blessing My brother John, the […]
Dreams are real as long as they last. Can we say anymore about life? ~ Henry Havelock Ellis If, as Carl Jung proposed, the psyche has a foreshadowing of death before it comes, how do the physical circumstances of death line-up with it? And if the psyche does indeed experience a foreshadowing of death through […]
He was, in his own words, “an operator,” which I understood as a reference to his street smarts. And he had the lingo to prove it. For my dad a beautiful woman was always “a hot tomato,” people who didn’t know what they were talking about were “blowing smoke,” “hatchi katchi” meant “fooling around,” and […]
I’ve been hit in the gut – not with the flu – but with loss. My father died unexpectedly Monday evening. I feel deflated…and defeated. Ironically, the most upbeat day in the 6 weeks he’s been in the hospital since his car accident was also his last. Everyone was excited that he […]
My brother Jimmy died in the summer of 2001, and my brother Danny followed him just a month later. Jim’s birthday, November 22, sometimes fell on Thanksgiving Day, and so Thanksgiving and the days leading up to it remind me and my family of Jim. Below is an excerpt from “The Jim and Dan Stories,” […]
Even a pen has a lifespan, I think to myself just as mine has run out of ink in the middle of writing a sentence. The pen doesn’t come back the following season like the leaves on the poplar tree outside my bedroom window will come back in the spring… ~ From “The Jim and […]
Death is like sex. It’s something everyone does, but you hardly ever see it, and no one talks much about it–not publicly any ways. Death, like sex, is raw. It demands that you give it its due. ~Colleen, “The Jim and Dan Stories.” My poet friend, Mara, who I share a grief bond with and […]
How come you can get 3 months off work for maternity leave and only about 3 days for bereavement? ~ My husband, Joe. When I wrote the “Jim and Dan Stories,” about losing two brothers a month apart, I was really putting myself and my family “out there.” And so much has come back to […]
“Everything has its roots in the unseen world…Every wondrous sight will vanish…Every sweet word will fade” ~ Rumi We buried my older brother, Jim, who died suddenly at the age of fifty-four, in July 2001. My younger brother, Dan, died a month later at the age of forty-nine. Since their deaths, life has had a […]
