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Being young, Coming of age, Death and dying, John Lennon, learning to drive, Memoir, Mother Daughter Relationship, riding a bicycle, saying goodbye, Starting over, Time, widowed
wheels keep turning
He has been dead for 59 days, and we both miss him. He missed her 16th birthday and the first time she got behind the wheel of a car, his car. And she missed him. It was this past Christmas Day – her first without him – that my daughter took me for a drive. My father, a world away from his rural Derry home, had been teaching her to drive on what he still considers the wrong side of the road, reminding her to keep her hands at ten-to-two on the steering wheel and, most of all, to believe in herself.
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Awesome Women, Being young, Breaking Bad, Fireworks, Friendships, Grieving, James Gandolfini, Lou Reed, Love, Marriage, Memoir, Mother Daughter Relationship, New Year, Northern Ireland Culture, Rites of passage, Robert Frost, saying goodbye, The Sopranos, Themes of childhood, Time, Writing
cups of kindness
“Life isn’t some vertical or horizontal line — you have your own interior world, and it’s not neat.” Patti Smith How do I begin to put the stuff of the past twelve months in a box and tie it up in a big red bow? Just begin. Pluck out a memory and wrap it up. Move on to the next. Handle with care. It’s the perfect day for it, New Year‘s Eve, a day designated for wrapping things up, for reminiscing and resolving; for Auld Lang Syne and kissing strangers; for holding on and letting go. For loose ends. For fireworks. There was more to 2013 than its last forty-six days;…
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A Poem for Michael and Christopher, Blackberry Picking, Clearances, Family, Feminism, nikki giovanni, Northern Ireland, Northern Ireland Culture, Poetry, removing training wheels, Rites of passage, Rituals, Soundtracks of our Lives, Starting over, Themes of Childhood, Time, Wheels within Wheels
getting a grip on things ~ noli timere
Had someone told me this was going to happen, I wonder what we would have done differently or better or both with our remaining days together. Would an expiration date on our family have changed the way we lived those thirty days? Would we have crammed in the kinds of things typically found on bucket-lists or would we have made sure to say or unsay things otherwise forgotten. Would we have focused on letting go or holding on?
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Aging, Arizona, Birthdays, Breast Cancer Awareness Month, Death and dying, Diagnosis, Family, Fireworks, Irish culture, Irish mammies, John Hiatt, Loss, Love, Memoir, Memory, Mother Daughter Relationship, Muriel Rukeyser, New Year, Newgrange, No Country for Old Men, Northern Ireland Culture, Ordinary Things, saying goodbye, Soundtracks of our Lives, Starting over, Ted Kooser, Themes of Childhood, Time
my ‘slow turning’ ~ winter solstice 2013
It is a magic time, captured before clocks and calendars and compasses measured time and the distance between us, signifying the turn towards a new year. I’m not ready for it. I am not ready for days that stretch out even longer than each of the thirty-six that have passed since the day my husband died. Thirty-six. I cannot bring myself to convert those days to weeks or to say it’s been over a month already. I’m not ready, not equipped to turn away from a life with him to one without him, even though the bank is clamoring for a certified copy of the death certificate so they can…
