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Art, Awesome Women, Blogging, Breast Cancer Treatment, Chemotherapy, Family, Fathers and sons, Friendships, Happy Father's Day, Loss, Love, Memoir, Poetry, Seamus Heaney, Social Media, Writing
a promise kept for father’s day
On June 15th, 2013, I wrote the following as a promise to Karen Sutherland. I am profoundly saddened to learn of her passing exactly four years later. Karen was witty and wise and much loved by her ‘sisters’ in the online breast cancer community. She always offered a soft place to fall and an encouraging word even as she dealt with the ravages of cancer and loss in her own life. It was my honor to know you, Karen, for you made the world a much better place. My deepest condolences to your family. I remember you once shared with me a lovely story about your Hugh, and I promised I…
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At Sea on Father’s Day – Grief Reconsidered.
Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. ~John Updike This is not a truism we consider daily. Typically, it is reserved for the day we are handed bad tidings – the cancer diagnosis that forces us to stare down our own mortality, or when the dreaded or unexpected news arrives that someone we love is dead or dying. From that day on, everything is different; we are different, mourning for what was lost, for who we were the day before, and for what we can no longer have. There was and is no easy remedy, no standard step-by-step process for any of us. There is no beaten path to…
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The Man I Love Has Cancer.
The man I love has cancer. And, after months of deliberation, of decisions made and decisions overturned, he has begun treatment. Radiation treatment. Every single day. For forty more days. With my own cancer treatment in the rear-view mirror, I thought I would just know how to help him, how and when to find the best and kindest words to lift him up, to quell the fear, to be “there” for him. Then I remind myself that the treatment of cancer is a private act with stretches of time spent in a surreal and solitary confinement. Along the way, I know I can point out some of the landmarks – detection,…
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putting down roots
Remembering summers past . . . Lawn-mowers and leaf-blowers strike up their tune much earlier when summer arrives in the desert southwest. By the time I left for work on Monday, I noticed, with the same kind of resignation triple-digit temperatures bring every year, that the flower beds were empty, the freshly mown grass less green, and, where just weeks before long branches hung low and heavy with hot pink blooms, were almost-bare limbs exposed to the sky above our house. I remember the uncharacteristically hot Spring day when our little family drove to a the Moon Valley nursery in search of a tree just like those which provided some shade during our weekend strolls…
