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

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.

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.

Poetry

Upbraided

I see a couple through the plate glass windows of a social hall on the bottom level of a dorm.

She is combing and braiding the hair at the back of his neck, 
her fingers working through a small section of it.

Though their eyes don’t meet, 
they are connected by this intimate act

And I want to cry

For their bond 	
	
	and bonds broken, 

For the simple 
	
	when things have gotten so complicated,

For the trust inherent in the running of fingers through one’s hair – 

and the pain in knowing someone else is doing it

Living

Blossoming

Our task is not to learn how to be loving; the love within us is already full and alive. Our practice is to melt the fear and armor that imprisons our hearts. Then our impulses to love and our inclinations to be generous and kind blossom easily and surely within us.

from Legacy of the Heart: The Spiritual Advantages of a Painful Childhood

by Wayne Muller

Weekend Write-Off, Writing

This is Love

When the other Dr. Meescham was alive and I could not sleep, do you know what he would do for me? This man would put on his slippers and he would go out into the kitchen and he would fix for me sardines on crackers. You know sardines?”

Ulysses shook his head.

“Little fishes in a can. He would put these little fishes onto crackers for me, and then I would hear him coming back down the hallway, carrying the sardines and humming, returning to me.” Dr. Meescham sighed. “Such tenderness. To have someone get out of bed and bring you little fishes and sit with you as you eat them in the dark on night. To hum to you. This is love.”

– from The Illuminated Adventures of Flora & Ulysses by Kate DiCamillo

Living, Weekend Write-Off, Writing

At the Intersection of Love and Passion

If a human being closes her eyes hard enough and for long enough, she can remember pretty well everything that has made her happy. The fragrance of her mother’s skin at the age of five and how they fled giggling into a porch to get out of a sudden downpour. The cold tip of her father’s nose against her cheek. The consolation of the rough part of a soft toy that she has refused to let them wash. The sound of waves stealing in over rocks during their last seaside holiday. Applause in a theater. Her sister’s hair, afterwards, carelessly waving in the breeze as they’re walking down the street.

And apart from that? When has she been happy? A few moments. The jangling of keys in the door. The beating of Kent’s heart against the palms of her hands while he lay sleeping. Children’s laughter. The feel of the wind on her balcony. Fragrant tulips. True love.

The first kiss.

A few moments. A human being, any human being at all, has so perishingly few chances to stay right there, to let go of time and fall into the moment. And to love someone without measure. Explode with passion.

A few times when we are children, maybe, for those of us who are allowed to be. But after that, how many breaths are we allowed to take beyond the confines of ourselves? How many pure emotions make us cheer out loud, without a sense of shame? How many chances do we get to be blessed by amnesia?

All passion is childish. It’s banal and naive. It’s nothing we learn; it’s instinctive, and so it overwhelms us. Overturns us. It bears us away in a flood. All other emotions belong to the earth, but passions inhabits the universe.

That is the reason why passion is worth something, not for what it gives us but for what it demands that we risk. Our dignity. The puzzlement of others and their condescending, shaking heads.

from Britt-Marie Was Here by Fredrik Backman

motherhood

The True Meaning of Motherhood

What is a mother anyway?

What does it truly mean to be a mother?

In its simplest form, I suppose a woman becomes one through the act of birthing – but even that isn’t completely accurate. There are other roads and other roles women play to become mother.

The act of caring. The act of doing. Laundering. Ferrying. Carrying. Remembering. Reminding. Feeding. Bathing. Nursing.

Yes, but littles don’t even notice when we do these things. Maybe if we don’t.

Is it the arts and crafts, then? The activities? The culturally enriching experiences?

Our tremendous aplomb at managing the tightrope of work and home life? Or the cutting-edge at-home preschool curriculum we’ve essentially created to validate our exit from the working world?

Motherhood, at its core, is this.

Jennifer Butler Basile

The gentle, yet firm embrace of a mother’s arms around her child. The child, no matter the age, wrapped in a ball to crawl into that embrace. Precious little head tucked in the hollow between mother’s chin and shoulder. The child inhaling the indescribable comfort of laundry detergent mixed with bath oil and mom’s own musk; Mother inhaling the memory of sweet baby down. A kiss planted on top of that now full head of hair.

When we think of motherhood in its purest form, we can all do this. We can all excel and revel in this most revered of roles.

If we remember what is at its core:

Love

Survival, Weekend Write-Off

Make Room for Ove

“It was the first time since the accident that he heard Sonja laughing. As if it was pouring out of her, without the slightest possiblity of stopping it, like she was being wrestled to the ground by her own giggling. She laughed and laughed and laughed until the vowels were rolling across the walls and floors, as if they meant to do away with the laws of time and space. It made Ove feel as if his chest was slowly rising out of the ruins of a collapsed house after an earthquake. It gave his heart space to beat again.”

– from A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman

Weekend Write-Off

For the Love of Ove

“And when she took hold of his lower arm, thick as her thigh, and tickled him until that sulky boy’s face opened up in a smile, it was like a plaster cast cracking around a piece of jewelry, and when this happened it was as if something started singing inside Sonja. And they belonged only to her, those moments.”

– from A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman

Chopping Potatoes

and other metaphors for motherhood

Tag Archives: love