rewriting life after unimaginable loss
4 minute read
“Nobody wants to read a book like this,” one publishing consultant told me before I’d published Willower: Rewriting Life After Unimaginable Loss.
Snarky-like, I wanted to say, “I would’ve preferred never to have written a book like this, and to never read one like it either, but…here we are.”
Continue reading “one reader at a time”
3 minute read
April 30, 2026.
Since every day, almost every hour, I think of my beautiful boy, Sam. His name circles my mind, my heart, from back to front, a subtle loop, a recording, a continuous ticker tape, in the background a whirring, clicking, and beeping biotelemetry.
Sam Kassenoff
3/2/98 – 4/30/2007
Today’s not so different from any other day, really. Only a marker in time; nineteen years.
Time keeps on ticking, moving along. Time has taught me how to… It’s dulled my sorrow into a tolerable ache, which I’ve learned to live with and reshape, somehow, into words.
Continue reading “His name, remembered, spoken, and written…”
2 minute read
It’s Monday, March 2, your birthday. Oh my gosh, you’re twenty-eight today. I’m sitting here, early morning, outside in the dark, remembering you, my beautiful boy.
You’ll always be my beautiful boy. Though I know you’re older now, larger than life.
Far away.
Continue reading “near, even when far away”
5 minute read
For the first few months after Sam’s death, I suffered stabbing headaches in and around my eyes.
“Narrow-angle glaucoma,” the ophthalmologist said. “Yours is the worst I’ve seen.”
I wondered if the pain was from not crying. I didn’t ask. The question sounded ridiculous in my head: My son, he’s gone, and it hurts when I cry, so I wonder, did this happen, this buildup—of tears?—because I’ve been stopping myself from crying? Suppressing grief, like pruning branches, I’ve learned, only causes it to mushroom.
(an excerpt from Willower: Rewriting Life After Unimaginable Loss: Chapter 8. Grieving)
It’s been over eighteen years since my little boy died. So I wasn’t expecting this.
Continue reading “Grief grabbed me again”
3 minute read
A FEW DAYS AGO, I mentioned I was tackling the huge project of scanning (digitizing) all my photos (and other mementos), and backing them up box by box. Well…
Continue reading “life lessons my mother sent me”
5 minute read
For months now, I haven’t felt like blogging. I write every day. Privately. Nothing I feel like sharing or showing to anyone.
Continue reading “saving the past: scanning photos and memories”
1 minute read
Sam,
I’m still here.
I’m still counting moons: 223 since you’ve been gone. Eighteen years—two of your lifetimes! How can this be?
Too much time has passed, I know, for me to hope you might still one morning come padding out of your bedroom, smiling at me as if nothing happened.
Continue reading “here, still”
2 minute read
Morning. I am here, sitting outside meditating, eyes closed, feeling the sun on my face, rising. Imagining, for a few minutes, that it’s him, his light, shining on me, in me.
It’s your birthday today, sweet son of mine.
Continue reading “Another birthday”
3 minute read
I didn’t know that the Mona Lisa painting became popular after it was stolen. Talk about absence making the heart grow fonder!
We often don’t realize the impact art can have on our hearts.
Art, in any form, can guide and motivate and inspire us.
So . . .
What art inspires you?
What speaks to your heart?
Continue reading “Discover the Art That Speaks to Your Heart”
2 minute read
JANUARY 28, twelve years ago today, was the day Rebecca decided would be her last. And I’m missing her, my longtime and loving friend.
A few years back, I wrote this. This morning, while thinking about what day it is, I read it again, grateful to have written about and to her.
Continue reading “what to do with those sad gone thoughts: write”
3 minute read
(👆In the photo: my father and me heading into my grandmother’s house in Miami, circa 1967.)
He died seventeen years ago today. And, as Forrest Gump said, “That’s all I have to say about that.”
I don’t feel sad or wistful. I’m like a wheat field, waves of beige sameness. Neutral, undisturbed, bending with the wind.
Continue reading “remembering my dad”
7 minute read
“You don’t have to be a writer to be a journaler, but journal keeping will make you a writer anyway.”
— Robert Moss
4 minute read
What we practice becomes permanent.
– Gabriela Pereira, author, speaker, and founder of DIYMFA.com
Ouch. That line pinched me in the arm the other day when I was listening to DIYMFA podcast, episode 470, Draft Zero.
Continue reading “from drafts to done: building a habit of finishing your writing”
2 minute read
Continue reading “sidewalks (3) a theather”Walking, connecting with nature,
picking up something meaningful,
a reminder of us when . . .
or evidence,
a clue—the idea of it,
in the smallest of things, a feather.
Exploring, searching, moving to keep going.
This meditative practice of mine, my morning ritual,
is when I see, in my reverie, how he saw the world.
And as I’m scanning the sidewalk and its edges,
rambling, drifting, daydreaming, thinking of him,
his sweet voice, his curious nature,
I come upon treasure then, a theather.
2 minute read
Every single one of us has a completely unique and deeply personal journey that we take on this thing we call life . . . Find the courage to take the wheel and steer it wherever your heart desires.
— Mel Robbins
FOR THE LAST FEW MONTHS, I’ve been feeling like I’m floundering, languishing. Sitting in the passenger’s seat (or some days, the backseat) staring at the weeds, at life, along the soft shoulder as they pass by; instead of taking the wheel, looking forward, and navigating from the driver’s seat.
Continue reading “on reinventing”
1 minute read
Continue reading “on walking”In grief, all we can do is take notes and learn as we go, keep walking through the damage—talk and share and create as we speak—and stay at it, try to make something of it, our loss, and find new meaning in that.
(excerpt from Willower: Rewriting Life After Unimaginable Loss: Chapter 9. Migrating)
3 minute read
WHENEVER I READ a book, I always find my very own personal takeaway, a sentence or two that stands out to me, seemingly as if the writer meant the message just for me—like a private note. The author may not have even meant for that particular line or two to be one of the story’s takeaways, and therein lies the magic (of words, and reading books).
Continue reading “without imagination…”
1 minute read
Grieving, like writing, is hard work, done mostly in solitude.
Continue reading “grieving is hard work”
2 minute read
LAST WEEK’S POST, sidewalks (1), was the first in what I’m hoping will be a series of short posts (if I can stick to my plan). You don’t have to read sidewalks (1), or look for my upcoming sidewalk posts (each Wednesday), but . . . I really hope you do.
Continue reading “sidewalks (2) luna moth”
4 minute read
The word sidewalk appears thirty times in my book Willower.
The line I love you more than all the sidewalks in the world appears nine times.
The first time I heard this was when Sam, as a toddler, said it to me. It stayed with me. It was a funny thing to hear, an unusual measurement to use—sidewalks? But then, the sidewalk was our world; where we spent most of our time collecting acorns, bugs, sticks, stones . . .
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