My father died five years ago yesterday, on January 5, 2015. His death was sudden—I’d spoken to him the day before, and I’d had emails from him that morning. My brother talked to him that evening as our dad decided to go to the hospital because of some abdominal pain. […]
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Milestone: Deleting My Father’s Email
Today, April 25, 2018, would have been my father’s 85th birthday. (He was 52 days younger than my mother, so her 85th birthday passed several weeks ago.) He died on January 5, 2015, and we held his memorial service on April 25, 2015—three years ago today, on what would have […]
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Different Forms of Grieving
I did not plan to write this week about losing my parents—that’s a subject I’ve covered many times in this blog (see here and here for examples). But this week is the third anniversary of my mother’s death, and the topic is on my mind. Three years sounds like a […]
Continue readingThe Second Anniversary of Loss
Tomorrow marks the second anniversary of my father’s death, which happened just six months after my mother’s death. I find myself in a much better place than I was on the first anniversary. I wrote a year ago today that I was melancholic—past the immediacy of loss, but still mourning. […]
Continue readingMy Grandfather’s Clock as a Metaphor for Grief
I’ve written before about my grandfather’s clock—how it formed a part of my childhood, first in my grandparents’ home and then in my parents’; how I deliberately let it wind down after my father died; how I shipped to to my house and got it working again. (see here and […]
Continue readingA Story I Couldn’t Tell Before: The Sister I Never Knew
Shortly before my mother’s death, my father and I reviewed the draft obituaries my parents had written for themselves several years earlier, long before my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. At the time my father showed me the obituaries, my mother was about to go into hospice. We knew we […]
Continue readingSurviving a Year of Loss
As the first anniversary of my father’s death approaches (he died on January 5, 2015), I find myself increasingly melancholy. I’m no longer in shock, as I was for the first few weeks after he was gone. I recently read through my journal from those weeks, and I wondered how […]
Continue readingTrue Confessions: My Sister Peeled Her Peas
My sister is now eligible for AARP membership and is an accomplished professional, but I often remember her as a child. She was born when I was eight-and-a-half, and I left home when she turned nine, so our common experiences were limited to those few years. We were both picky […]
Continue readingA Year of Firsts: On Losing and On Finding Again
My mother died on July 4 last year, so I am completing a year of firsts—the first Thanksgiving without her, the first Christmas, her birthday in early March, St. Patrick’s Day (a big holiday for her), Easter, Mother’s Day, and now the anniversary of her death. In many ways, I […]
Continue readingAn Almost Sixty-Year Love Story, or Sixty-Six, If You Start at the Beginning
Shortly after Christmas last year, my father commented to me that it was the first Christmas in sixty-six years he had not spent with my mother. “Ever since I took her to the Snow Ball when we were sophomores in high school,” he said. They started dating as fifteen-year-olds, “went […]
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