Life is Your Story

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

It’s that moment when you turn off the lights to go to sleep. But sleep doesn’t come. Shadows invite you to dance with them on the wall. Your mind drifts along a river of worry and questions – so many questions. There are trivial thoughts such as the list of things to do that you didn’t do and whether you have a stomach ache from the dessert you ate or was it that sandwich with all the mayonnaise you had for lunch? Then the heavyweights move in. You miss those whom are no longer with you. Whether it’s a break up, a divorce or they have passed from this world;there is always going to be an emptiness in the depth of your gut. There are many “what ifs?” and “what’s next?” There’s a true appreciation for all that you have – for the person lying beside you, for your  children sound asleep, for the parents you so dearly love, some with you, some gone and some hanging on for dear life. There’s money. There’s always money. It shouldn't be in ...

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,...

The friendships you create and nurture when you are younger are different than the ones you establish later in life. The friends who grew up with you knew your entire family. They played in your house and sometimes their siblings and your siblings and a whole gang of neighbourhood kids joined together for a game of baseball or hockey or just to hang around in the park doing nothing and doing everything. They also knew things that friends you meet later in life will never know like the smell of your house/family. You know the way every family has their “smell” They also knew if your mom was a good cook and enjoyed her best meals and desserts and they knew what type of food was in your fridge and in your pantry and how much of it they could get away with eating without feeling uncomfortable. There was that one house where everyone hung out either because the parents were away often or they just didn’t care if there were 20 kids in their basement doing whatever they were doing....

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...

I lost my father this morning and in losing him I lost myself. I watched him suffer for months and I deeply questioned and disagreed with the pain and indignity that was bestowed upon him. You  often read in obituaries that the person fought a valiant battle. My father fought an impossible battle but he still fought it with all the realms of possibility and we were there right beside him around the clock as he was there for us throughout our childhood and later into adulthood. He was a super extroverted person. He spoke to everyone, he spoke to anyone and he listened. He was a radio broadcaster, a DJ, a sports journalist, a talk show host, a radio school teacher, a community man who volunteered and hosted numerous charitable events, the stadium announcer for both the McGill and Concordia teams. At his prime in reporting, he knew all of the Expos, Habs, Alouettees, WWF, jockeys at Blue Bonnets and many celebrities he interviewed on his Sunday radio show for CKVL. ...

I’ve been writing a lot about suffering lately. I realize that there are more cheerful things to write about but few as powerful. The truth is I would rather suffer myself than watch someone I love suffer. After what I have seen in the last 48 hours I would also say that being beside that bed in ER and in ICU is like watching a horror movie in which the images are so disturbing that you have to turn the TV off or change the channel; the obvious difference being that in real life you cannot go backward or forward when time freezes you right there in that awful moment. And anyone who has been through the maze that is our medical system can tell you that there are days when you think they will stabilize and although they will never be back to themselves or on their way home; they are still somewhat okay or as best as can be expected. The light in their eyes is present and their personalities, sarcasm, jokes and all are in full swing. They just don’t feel so well and it becomes this...

What will you remember about your life when all is said and done? Will it be the people who accompanied you on your journey? Will it be the places you explored and traveled to along the way? Will it be a cat or a dog that showed you the meaning of true friendship? Will it be the last word spoken to you by someone you will never get to speak to again? What would you choose to remember if your memory could be wiped clean of just one thing that happened to you in your entire life? Would it be the fist time your parents told you they loved you? Would it be the first time you realized you loved yourself? Would it be the first time you held your child? Would it be the first lips that brushed against yours? Who would you choose to remember? What would you say to them, if you could have them there right in front of you for just a few moments? Isn't it amazing how much detail we are capable of remembering when we shut out all the noise, close our eyes, and feel ...

Our parent’s age and they either go suddenly or slowly – either way is awful. And as much as we prepare ourselves for the obvious inevitability; we are never ready to say goodbye. I would say the worst thing by far is witnessing their demise. When they first become ill, injured or otherwise incapacitated, they are still themselves but as it drags on and drags everyone along with it, the family is left exhausted, spent and staring at a petrified, confused stranger in a hospital bed who use to be their parent. There are medical professionals who are very kind and do all they can.   It’s important to realize that every patient who is admitted to their floor is followed by a long parade of characters consisting of family members all with their own personalities and idiosyncrasies, opinions and demands. They are upset, tired and fed up and that can make for a very unpleasant atmosphere for all. It is hard to remain neutral when you find your loved one curled up, shiveri...

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...

This post was written in dedication to one of the brave and hopeful moms who attended support groups that I facilitated and who did all she could to fight the fight with her son who struggled/battled with mental illness. Unfortunately the illness won. Mental illness is often a secret - a whisper in the air - a mystery - a demon that haunts its victims and destroys their minds. At some point - someone will love someone who suffers from mental illness on one level or another - reach out even if they cannot-  help transform the secret into a shout and the mystery into a discovery. You may just save a life. There is a woman who goes to the same park every day and she brings a kite with her. She draws on the wings with magic markers. She wears a tattered camel-skin coat and her legs are covered in leotards. Her hands are freckled and dance to the rhythm of a tremor. She pauses before flying the kite to write in her journal and sip coffee from her thermos. She eats a croissant out of...

My father broke his back last week. He has since been in the hospital recovering although in much pain and enduring several complications that are particularly scary as he moves closer to 80 years of age. My family came together instantly like a task force or for all my Montreal readers, like a group of students revved up for a demonstration, a unrelenting desire to stand by our beliefs, our moral code, our father. What's sad when you get to this stage of life (that being me and my siblings all in our 40s with families of our own, challenging careers, schedules, our own health issues, financial burdens, etc) you have to stand back and pause and deal with the realization that your parents are aging quickly and as this process mangles whatever quality of life they had, you watch them change and lose their independance. It hurts to see them hurt and it's exhausting to stand by their bed and it's disheartening to know that they cannot feed, bathe, relieve themselves...

When someone we love dies, we want them back. Plain and simple. It's like a crime has been committed. They've been taken - sometimes with warning and sometimes without warning - sometimes expected yet always unexpected. There are those we accompany as far as we can toward whatever comes next. We sit by their bed and we wish we could take the suffering and pain away. We are ready to give ourselves in their place. We are aching and frightened. We know what is coming as the butterflies move at warp speed in our stomachs and photos clips turn into horrid collages of the darkest scenes from the obituary in which we can't say what we really want to say and to the funeral that too many strangers attend and the eulogy that will never do them justice and the burial - the shovel to the dirt, the dirt to the coffin, a final curtain call without ample applause to a life well lived and the love they gave. Then there are the ones that just happen the way things just sort ...

I recently gave up my car and switched to walking and public transport. So I've been taking the subway for the first time in many, many years (enough to say "many" twice). It's fast and convenient and the whole thing has been going quite well until the other day. I was running down one of the many sets of stairs (I forgot how far underground the subway is and how many stairs it takes to get down and back up) and there at the bottom laying on the floor was a homeless man. He was flat on his back, his eye lids twitching furiously with the white of his eyeballs in full view. He had a strong stench to him and I really couldn't tell if he was dying or just really stoned. The amazing thing was that all the other people were just walking around him and heading on their way without even a pause or a concern for this man. Maybe I just wasn't use to seeing this type of thing but it seemed extremely odd that no one cared. I tried to make eye contact with a w...