Category Archives: Rewriting

Rewriting life after loss.

what I learned from a soldier

Dad

In Memory of my father, Don Everett  (9/1/1935 – 1/9/2008)

What I learned from a soldier…

About strength
It’s okay to cry…

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by Issa, Japanese poet and willower

Quote: Issa
This dewdrop world
It is a dewdrop world;
and yet, and yet...

Does Issa speak of longing? His tears? Or continuing, despite the tears? I first read these lines a handful of years ago. When I was too attached. Unwilling to go on without—

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“Wanna see a picture of my baby that died?” she said.

Life had different plans

The day before yesterday (Thursday, May 1, 2014), I had plans to hit the month running, or at least walking. Post the first entry in the new series I’ve been working on. And then meditate—for at least ten minutes (a day)—a personal goal I’ve set for this May. Neither happened though. This day, life had different plans in store.

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shadows beside me

Boys at sunset, Naples '04
Naples beach, 2004, watching the sun set

While we (bereaved parents) are readjusting to our perception of what grief is, and who we are as we grieve, and how our relationship with our deceased child will be, grief changes and evolves, subsides and resurfaces. 

Right after our child’s death, we see only devastation. Grief is all-consuming and suspends us in time. There is no future. We become grief. As more time passes, and our grief is affected by the inward (example: solitary) and outward (example: social) steps we take, we begin to fantasize:

What if…he were here, alive, today…in high school now…driving… What would he look like? How tall would he be? Would he wear his hair short? Or long and shaggy? How funny he would be…if…and what would his laugh sound like now?

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