Tag Archives: loss

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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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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music notes yellowed sheet music
grief, music

Uncaging the Elephant

It was a new single 
but hearing it brought me back
to seeing them perform live
two summers ago

That made me think of the song
I wanted to share with my dad
because it sounded like guitar-driven neatly sewn together 60s -
but could never remember the name
when the time came

Now I’m thinking about how the time has gone
And just as I’m slipping into melancholy
the disc shifts to Paul Simon 
As it always does when I’m driving and thinking of Dad

The joy felt by me and Julio down by the schoolyard
is drenched by the downpour 
and the demise of Glen Hansard
as he sings to his babe in arms atop an Irish mount

Forward and back
Side to side
A web of associations and feelings
All attached to notes floating in the ether
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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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Poetry

Personal Effects II

I wrote a poem about loss.

No one died, but all around me there was empty space with the possibility.

When we worry, when the unknowns build into an ugly catastrophe

it’s easy to be overwhelmed by the gravity of it all.

In the stark cavity created by the spidery black legs of a thinly padded plastic chair and the expanse of institutional white tile below

sat the plastic bag

holding the physical items that tied personality to my baby

The ones she doffed for an anonymous starched gown

that dwarfed her inside

all of the unknown

While I sat staring at the obscenely transparent plastic holding but a small part of her.

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Poetry

Personal Effects

There is nothing so sad as a clear plastic hospital bag.

Kite-string thin threaded through plastic puckers

pulling at the corners, ripping at the seams

The material trappings of this world lumped at the bottom

Empty expanse of cellophane spread out for the world to see

Contained for safe keeping

Inconsequential in the aftermath

Who cares for scrunchies and soft socks

When the immaterial has left this mortal coil

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Weekend Write-Off, Writing

Loss in Children’s Literature

The first book caught my eye from its display, the title singing to my soul, The Poet’s Dog, a novel by Patricia MacLachlan.  The second, I found flipping through the bins of picture books, its title, Until We Meet Again (Susan Jones), speaking to my family’s recent season of loss.  Little did I know how thematically intertwined they both were.

Both titles speak to children bearing and moving through the loss of a loved one.imgres

The Poet’s Dog is more novella than novel and told in sparse prose.  But it is told from the point of view of Teddy, the poet Sylvan’s dog.  And Teddy, while wise and loquacious for a dog, is dealing with the stark life left him by Sylvan’s death.  There is a beauty and simplicity to the unfolding of this tale and the healing that takes place.  Teddy, in saving two siblings from a raging storm, is himself saved by their companionship.  The siblings, Nickel and Flora, and readers don’t find out what exactly happened to Sylvan until halfway through the book, which is really quite wonderful in terms of grief.  Teddy, like so many experiencing loss, comes to a slow realization of the gravity of the absence of his loved one; even slower, comes the ability to share the painful parts of that loss.  He opens up as he comes to terms with it – and it is through the gentle love and presence of the now dear young friends.

untilwemeet-448x600Until We Meet Again, a picture book by Susan Jones, illustrated by Shirley Antak, is told from the perspective of an adorable little boy, made so both by Antak’s rendering and the amazing way he transcends death’s grip on his beloved grandfather.  The opening sequence shows the deep bond and ritual of this grandfather/grandson relationship.  The boy obviously adores the strong influence of his grandfather.  When he first gets news of his grandfather’s eventual demise, he is unsettled, of course, but this midsection of the book sets the stage for the last, when the boy becomes the strong influence.  He initiates and continues all of their special traditions, validating his grandfather, cementing their unending bond, and gathering his own strength for life without him.

Both these titles tackle a topic that is usually met with the awkward shrug of a smile, the stammering silence of not knowing what to say.  The subject matter is the stuff we try to shield our kids from, not books we willingly hand them.  But as with any tough topic, the children dealing with death need them right now.

Ironically, I chose not to share them with my children right now.  Perhaps I am being naive in thinking I can protect them from the direct blow of death for just a bit longer, but they’ve yet to be at a funeral.  They blessedly haven’t felt the stinging sorrow of a daily hole in their lives.  The deaths dealt to our family recently have been on their periphery.  But to know I have such gentle and poignant resources in literature should I need them – I’m glad the literary universe conspired to bring them both to me in the same lending cycle.

 

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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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