Tag Archives: grief

17th century ship Vasa Stockholm Sweden
grief

Photos and a Good Layer of Guilt

I posted exactly one photo from a once-in-a-lifetime trip I took last September.

My dear friend whisked me away to Sweden, Stockholm specifically, and we had a fabulous time.

So much about our trip was aesthetic and Scandi and Instagram-worthy.

But the only photo I shared was one on the last full day of our trip, which happened to be my father’s last day on earth.

And while I subjected my husband and girls to a screen-cast slideshow squeezed on our couch when I was back stateside, the photos sat largely untouched for the last year.

Now I’ve been known to live in an entirely different timeline in scrap-landia. According to our family scrapbook, it is circa 2012.

But this was somehow different.

Somehow, and largely subconsciously, I’d covered those photos in a layer of guilt.

Guilt at not being by his bedside, guilt at not being there for my mother, guilt at not being there when he breathed his last.

Guilt at enjoying this life-expanding event while an equally heartbreaking one was occurring.

When the one-year anniversary of both came round, I wanted to honor both – but it still felt like throwing celebration in the face of sadness.

When I finally sorted through the hundreds of photos this week, it didn’t occur to me until I discussed it with my therapist the next day, that the process was actually part of grieving my father. I had been thinking of him all that week already. He had been with me in so many spiritual and even metaphysical ways. And while our trip had been planned well before he even fell ill, God had chosen his final time even sooner than that.

I didn’t choose to not be with my father. He would’ve chosen to savor each and every moment with me had I been able to come home and tell them all to him.

In so many synchronistic ways, we sailed together that week.

And what is grief – and life – but beauty and pain together.

Photo Info

17th-century warship Vasa at the Vasa Museum located on the island of Djurgården in Stockholm, Jennifer Butler Basile, September 21, 2025

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Caleb Oquendo Pexels
grief

The Playlist

With my father’s first visits to the oncologist, so started my early morning drives to meet my parents at the office.

I’d rouse the older ones to let them know the younger one was already awake downstairs and had had breakfast and head out on my own. A forty-five minute ride of silence became full with plenty of thoughts, questions, and worries.

But the agency of getting there at a certain time and meeting with/talking to the doctor, collecting information for my parents, being a second set of ears, a sounding board, a buffer, was an outlet for the enormity of what ifs and kicked the certainty of what we all dreaded into some indeterminate future.

When it became clear that he did, in fact, have cancer (one of the worst general zeitgeist told me you could get), my mind morphed to getting him through treatment, supporting him and making it as . . . enjoyable . . . as possible? or at least less horrific. The musical soundtracks of my sunshine drenched drives, soon to be snuffed out by ice cold air conditioning, inspired a growing playlist I was mentally making for my dad.

First, I pictured it as tunes meant to soothe and relax him as he sat through chemotherapy or radiation or whatever they would pump into him as he sat tethered to a chair. Then, when it was clear those weren’t options, I pictured the sonic waves surrounding him at home as he peacefully rested. When he slipped away faster than any of us could have imagined, a goal in that frenzied week between his passing and services was to finish that damned list so at least we could all listen to the kind of songs he loved as we celebrated his life. His spirit could still reverberate around us even if his presence didn’t.

A year ago this week, he lay on his death bed. And though it’s lived in my memory and mind’s eye and ears and in bits and pieces on the notes app of my phone, I built the playlist I never played for my father today. As I listened to each song before I hit the plus sign adding it to the list, I felt the moods and melodies envelop me, raise me up, raise that terribly beautiful feeling of love and anguish, holding me up and threatening to drop me from a great height like all of the delicately heartbreaking hymns of sacred masses.

And it pained me to think that he would’ve loved all these songs – if I’d only been able to share the carefully curated list I’d made for him.

And then I wondered if it was really all more for me all along.

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Francois Ayello Pexels
Living, Poetry

I do not want the hummingbirds to leave

I do not want the hummingbirds to leave

I do not want the sun to dip below the rim of trees

I do not want to hear the news reports tomorrow

or feel the guilt of joy on my birthday the day after

I feel as if there are never enough Septembers

Because I never get the care of self or relaxation right

in this month meant to celebrate

and yet it’s now conflated with the death of dad

and the ever-present dread of school

Both of those conflated with fear of fulfillment and failure

 

I do not want the hummingbirds to leave

and yet I fret about the singular one who seems to hang on

Does she not know it is time to get moving?

September only lasts so long

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Alfredo Marco Pradil Pexels
Weekend Write-Off

Guest for a Lifetime

"You have to understand," she said.  "Grief lasts forever."

     "Like death," I said.

     "Like death.  Except death is someone else's condition, and grief is all yours."

     "I feel worse now than I did shortly after she died."

     "And you'll feel even worse next year.  And worse the year after that, unless you find a way to
transform your grief."

     "We're back to that."

     "We've never left it," she said.  "Grief comes to you all at once, so you think it will be over all at 
once.  But it is your guest for a lifetime."

     "How should I treat this gift?  This unwelcome, uninvited guest."

     "Think of the one who sent it to you," she said.

The above excerpt is from a conversation Roger Rosenblatt shared in Kayak Morning: Reflections on Love, Grief, and Small Boats. See my post, Beside Myself, for my thoughts inspired by reading this memoir.

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Tom Fisk Pexels
grief, Uncategorized

Beside Myself

It did not escape me that the computer went black just as I went to hit send on an email scheduling a mass for the one-year anniversary of your death.

Your sense of humor was always a touch . . . little brother poking the bear?

And your infinite wisdom / innate annoyance of computer devices that should work a certain way certainly fits.

I also notice how often you order up a Paul Simon song (with or without Garfunkel), sometimes just at the moment I turn onto your and Mom’s street.

I could not and would not forget you lived there too and think of you each time I visit anyway.

I think of you each time one of the girls knows some random cultural touchpoint because you explained the archaic origin of it. I thought of how unfair it was that I learned my most recent one from a book and not from you, even though I heard it in your voice.

You are everywhere and nowhere.

And that is both comforting and irritating – just the way one of your factual and deeply researched pontifications were.

The same book that taught me that the “slang phrase, up shit’s creek, [is] from [the] Pawnee Indians, [a] reference to the Republican River which was polluted with buffalo manure, [meaning] in deep trouble” is also the one that offered this description of GRIEF:

The state of mind brought about when love, having lost to death, learns to breathe beside it. See also love.

Kayak Morning / Roger Rosenblatt

The way I found this book was coincidental – if you believe in those.

It was sitting kitty-corner atop the stack of memoirs at the edge of the stairs to the children’s section. I saw it as my foot hovered above the top step preparing to leave.

Had the librarian, whom I know personally, pulled it from the shelf and let it float there like flotsam in the hopes that I would see and read it? Did she know I needed stream-of-consciousness, nature-inspired writerly reflections on grief?

Did you know?

I would have made the connection anyway.

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Saab sidewalk Stockholm Sweden
Automobiles, grief

Not a Standard Transmission

When I was in kindergarten, my mother had a metallic blue Mustang. I have a clear memory of a thunderstorm with rain so torrential we had to pull into a parking lot on the side of the road, listening to “Gloria” by Laura Branigan until it passed. I cried when she and my father told me they were selling it, shyly offering up the cap of the same shiny shade of touch-up paint to the man who’d come to buy it. I was aghast when he intimated that he didn’t need it because he was thinking of changing the color.

When I learned to drive it was on a 1987 Ford Escort. Ironically, though it was my mother I’d watched expertly move through the gears in that shimmery blue mustang as a young girl, thinking she was psychic when she’d shift into first seconds before the light turned green (not knowing she was watching the edge of the light one quarter turn away), it was my father who bucked and shimmied beside me as I worked to unlock the nuances of clutch/gas, left/right mysteries.

That car became the key to many adventures, even before it officially became mine. I’d already bought my first brand new car in my own name when we sold to it a young guy with whom my dad worked. I tried to explain how my dad and I had maintained it over the years, changing the oil religiously, rotating the tires ourselves. As with the Mustang buyer, this guy was not that into it. Even less so in fact. He was planning on using it as a beater to get back and forth to work. And its age and actual metal frame and shell made it just that. Of course I’d attached much more than old Coast Guard and Annie’s Organic bumper stickers.

The very act of preparing a car for sale stirs a sorrow in me. Removing the bits of detritus that made the car yours seems to suck the soul right out of it. Seems sacrilegious. You almost want someone else to come and do it so you don’t have to see it.

Whenever we’ve left one of our cars on the lot after a trade-in, I get a feeling similar to the one I had leaving my stuffed animals alone while going off to school. You know, a bit guilty so you sit them up nice so they won’t be angry at you all day. Don’t forget rotating them so they don’t think you’ve got a new favorite.

I’ve written extensively about my love of the new car that replaced the first: my Saab. The psychological heft of that one. . . Yeesh. I won’t get into it here. Just note: Dad got me into them and it was a standard.

Now we are getting rid of the car that replaced the Saab. Adding one more layer to the separation. I was pregnant with my youngest when we picked this one out. I remember squeezing my swollen belly into it as George the salesman showed us how to synch our smartphones to the touchscreen system. That baby’s now nearly ten.

The Subie was my husband’s daily commuter and he had gotten sick of shifting while stuck in traffic. I asked whether he could take the minivan to work yesterday so I could have one last day driving it.

We got the standard transmission because of me. I was the one who’d been driving stick since I first learned to drive. My mom made it look like she was shifting a race car. My dad said it was a skill that would allow me to drive any vehicle for the rest of my life.

And now we are replacing the Subie with a car that does not have a manual transmission. As I drove to and from my errands yesterday, instead of the joy I expected to feel in the final throes of passion, I felt sadness: that cars don’t come through with standards anymore, that something as concrete and dependable as metal gears interlocking and propelling steel and self forward is no longer a permanent guarantee, that I may forget how to shift by the time we own a standard again.

That a skill I thought I’d have forever, given to me by my dad, is now in danger of going – just like he did.

And so, it’s much more than getting rid of a car.

* photo courtesy Danielle Ringer

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Claudio-Duart-Designer pixabay canva
Living, Mental Health, Survival

Five Years On

I’d like to blame my current malaise on COVID.

Not the having of the virus, though two times was punishment enough. (I know, it certainly could have been worse. Believe me, I know.)

And while the pandemic and attendant lockdown messed with my time-space continuum royally, it started in the months before.

When I let myself get so low, I had a near-panic attack just going to the doctor’s office to ask for meds.

When I got so low, I let my mind trick me into thinking needing meds was a moral failure on my part.

When I stumbled around in a fog so thick, I didn’t realize how bad it had gotten.

And then as I climbed out, I felt the need to tell the story.

I knew I needed to explain how I’d gotten there – for the mental health narrative and for my own mental health.

But the story was so huge. The path so steep and craggy, I knew not where to begin or how.

And the more time passes, the harder a thing is to tell. Details forgotten, edges dulled.

And then the world stopped.

We were all in survival mode. Myself acutely.

I thank God for the fortuitous timing of that first appointment.

For if I hadn’t started meds when I did –

thrown into ‘homeschooling’ and online learning and personal loss from afar. . .

But after months of bizarre, those details began to be forgotten and those edges dulled.

And this was life.

We were expected to pick up the baton and keep time

when time was wonky, hearts were broken, and psyches scarred.

Five years on

I’ve picked up bad habits, sloth and sipping alcohol.

Smack-dab in the middle of perimenopause

and the slog of midlife.

What started as peeling back the layers of over-exhaustion and exertion

flipped the other way into inert.

Achieving perfection and avoiding failure by not attempting at all

has settled into paralysis.

And now, what is life, but this fragile thing that can be taken and wrenched dry in mere months.

When the acute sorrow is gone and you’re left with nothing but the days

and another load of groceries to unpack.

Five years on

and I still can’t tell you how I got here.

But I have begun.

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Legacy, Living

Light and Dark

As the joy of the holidays subsided, the dark days of winter took hold.  Truly, the last few days of 2016 brought death to a close and disconcerting distance.  It stepped in and stayed until as recently as last week.  And still, it lingers.

I’d pulled my black leather pumps from their shelf high in the closet.  I’d arched my inner soles into their uncomfortable embrace.  I’d released my tired, swollen toes from their pinch at the end of the day.  But I’d yet to return them to their box; death would not let me store them away for the next black dress event.

There was another, and another.

A year of new life was marred by the loss of three precious ones.

Death is always waiting in the wings – but I’m comforted by the thought that their spirits fly in the wind that catches our breath and reminds us we’re alive.

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Maternal Health Month, Maternal Health Month 2014, may is maternal mental health month, Recovery

Return to Zero

Stigma.  Silence.  Simply impossible to say the right thing.

All of these surround the topic of neonatal death, miscarriage, and stillbirth.

Tonight, a film determines to shatter all that.

Return to Zero tells the story of a couple expecting their first child, whom they are devastated to discover has died before he could even be born.  It is the first feature film to tackle the uncomfortable and uncovered story of this type of tragedy.

Perhaps no one wants to watch a film with such a difficult plot, but certainly no parent wants to find themselves playing the starring role.  Just as we all find comfort and empowerment in reading our story on the page, finding our face on the screen, this film should prove powerful – and hopefully therapeutic – for parents who have been silenced by the horrific events of stillbirth.

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Maternal Health Month, Maternal Health Month 2014, may is maternal mental health month, Weekend Write-Off

Stranger than Fiction

 

You just can’t make this stuff up.

 

We’ve all heard people say this. We may have even heard some pretty good instances of the phenomenon. Read Kelly Kittel’s Breathe: A Memoir of Motherhood, Grief, and Family Conflict, however, and you’ll find perhaps the best exemplar of it ever.

Kittel’s story starts much like many other love stories: with the birth of a precious baby boy. We learn to know and love Noah, Kittel’s fourth child, right along with her. Amidst the love and adoration, though, there is an undercurrent of tension. Relations with extended family increasingly interfere with the Kittels’ close knit circle of immediate family, creating conditions ripe for catastrophe.

A tragic accident involving Noah is unfortunately and unbelievably only the first tragedy to befall Kelly and her family. In her quest for “an oversized house and a plastic car overflowing with round-headed pink and blue babies while [she] navigated [her] way through the Game of Life,” Kittel experienced miscarriages and an unnecessary stillbirth, unsupportive and argumentative family members.

Through personal anguish and legal battles, spiritual searches and encounters with nature, Kittel somehow arrives victorious on the other end, relishing each and every moment with her family of five living children and the spirit of those in heaven. Even with all its loss, Breathe is always – on every page, in every word – a life-affirming story.

I was fortunate enough to have read Breathe in its entirety before publication. Shortly after Kelly joined our writers’ group, she began sharing excerpts of her story, until we’d read, critiqued, and discussed the whole thing. We stroked the cover of her first proof when she passed it around the circle one night (it really is velvety soft!). We cheered her on upon its release on May 14, the birthday of her dear son, Jonah, his one and only day upon the earth.

Kelly Kittel wrote this story for those precious sons robbed of the oft-neglected privilege of breathing. But she also offers a poignant story of survival – her own. And in doing so, she most certainly will help countless mothers and women do the same.

Breathe-Cover

 

 

 

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