Life is Your Story

How do you comfort your mom after your dad passes away? How do you convince her that everything is going to be alright when you are unable to convince yourself? How do you expect her to just move on after having having spent most of her life with the same person? He was her best friend. They loved each other, they hated each other, they put up with one another, they ate breakfast together, they ate dinner together – he asked “how was your day?” and she asked “how was your day?” and other times they ate in silence. They forgave and forgot, they gave and they took, there was hurt and pain and joy and laughter. There was all that life could throw at them and all that they withstood as a united and powerful force created from love and devotion. They sacrificed for you and your siblings as all good parents do in wanting more for you than they had for themselves. They made a promise – in sickness and in health – knowing one would eventually fall ill while the other w...

If you sit down on the grass in the sun with the wind quietly purposefully listening for spirits of souls you have loved you will hear them if you let your mind at ease and stop thinking they will come to you and speak with a whisper you will feel them in the tall grass with your fingertips their voices will tell you they miss you as much as you miss them they'll surround you before they leave you they won't tell you where they are going just that you can't follow you'll stand up and walk away and just when you think they will never return the wind will blow the sun will shine and somewhere in the distance you will hear a hum

The Jewish New Year is quickly approaching. There will be honey and Challah and prayers and rejoicing. There will be families and loved ones and grandparents with grandchildren and aging parents with their own children. There will be laughter and jokes while enjoying dinner and lunch and walking home together arm in arm, hand in hand with the people most important to you. But there will also be fresh cuts that will turn into raw scars and never fully heal. There will be lasting images of the end of a life well lived packed with pain and suffering that served as a great injustice and indignity to the person that they were - a person who cared for you with every molecule of their soul and left this world too soon and too brutally. And you won't forget because you can't forget. Just when you think you may be having an okay moment, your stomach turns and you feel as if you are going to be sick except you are sick already - sick, exhausted, beaten and torn and there is...

In the Jewish religion it is traditional to “Walk around the block” at the end of the Shiva/mourning period. As a Rabbi recently explained to my family, it is a way of saying “we are finished mourning and are returning the community rather than having the community come to us.” For me, the “walk around the block” symbolizes the circle of life and the hard, cold fact that life goes on. You lose someone you love. You open your home to friends and family and people who come out of the woodwork that you never imagined seeing. You sit on low chairs that are hard as rock and your back aches, your legs cramps and your neck becomes stuck in an unnatural upright position. There are swarms of well-meaning people who “close talk” and touch and even kiss and hug you although if you ran into them on the street such acts of affection in many cases would not take place. People come to pay their respects for different reasons. Some have recently lost a parent and can relate to the awful,...

Mourning is an odd thing because losing someone you love does not necessarily put you in a constant state of crying and depression. It actually lifts you in ways you have not been lifted before. And in the Jewish religion through the Shiva period, you are surrounded by people who truly care about you and in most cases knew the deceased and how many lives they touched. And anyone who has experienced this week of mourning can attest to the fact that you are so distracted from the fire roaring in your gut that you are able to carry on without falling apart right there and then. But at night after everyone has left and you return home you feel the loss and the pain envelop you and it won’t let you go. And accompanying that are those final images pulling you down under the water gasping for air. Sleep never comes and you feel lost and alone even if someone is right there beside you. There is an immense crevice of emptiness that cannot be filled. Mornings are just as t...

If there is one day we all hope will never come, it's the one where our life partner has to be taken from us whether in life or in death. However it is all so common with the increase in Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, Cancers of every sort, that one of the two has to be hospitalized and evaluated and most always, inevitably the call is made by medical professionals who are doing their best but have far too many aging patients to monitor and evaluate and far too few specialists available to support them and so the call is that the said parent will never return to their home again. This crossroad means so many different and sad things to various family members. So I will use the Dad as an example. Your Dad has been told that he will never regain his independence - perhaps he can no longer walk or go without diapers or oxygen. Maybe he has a progressive disease that is moving at rampant rates. He is already frail, depressed and practically throwing in the towel after months t...

Towels of my life. 3 yrs old, cold, shivering, running out of the gated kids area at Blossom Pool, my mother, kneeling, open towel, wrap around me, warm, fabric softener scent, hug, love, safe. Guest - friends country house - age 11 - weekend in winter - new discovery - some families have two houses - one for the week - one for the weekend - we don't - here is the guestroom, here is the washroom and here is your towel - large, plush - it may even be new - yes I think they gave me a new towel - welcome. Boyfriend - Me - first shower with someone other than myself - towel on, towel off - all weekend long - fun, exciting, daring - and lots of towels. Grandmother - MS - confined to bed for 30 years - paralyzed from neck down - forehead as in head as in only part of body she can feel - heating up - fever - me 16,towel - cold water - hold gently on her against her forehead - brush of fingers to her cheek - does she know I love her? - does she know I wish I could fix her? - get a...