Tag Archives: processing

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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Living

Shades of the Past

The news of my junior-high-turned-life-long-friend’s father’s death shocked me. It shook me for its suddeness and the blow it served to my friend, his brother, and mother. It also pulled me back into a fold I hadn’t been part of for quite some time.

This family gave me first, the friendship of its younger son, then older brother, deepened by the quasi-adopted status of daughter in a family of boys. Through a childhood bond of the older brother and the wheeling and dealing of the younger, it gave me my husband. When our band of merry men wasn’t tearing into the cul-de-sac in front of their house, we were storming their vacation cottage in the mountains. We ate, drank mai tais the old way, and managed to meet up around the country and world as life took us on its various roads.

But year spooled into year, and suddenly it had been over a decade since I’d visited their home. I didn’t think it would affect me until our car slid into line with the others at the curb, much like it did when we’d jockey for position years ago. Stepping over the threshold from the breezeway to the kitchen, a wave of emotion rolled over me. The same wallpaper, the same linoleum, the same smell. The books, the airshow posters, the tea bags and coffee press. The fresh air billowing in the bathroom window overlooking the backyard. The same futon where three of us had crammed to watch German subtitled movies for English class.

We gathered around the table on the patio and drank the sweet, slushy lemonade of our childhood with a splash of rum from Pappy’s reserve. I don’t think I’d realized how much a place can take on a life of its own. But really, what this place gave me is a better appreciation for the people and times that made it so special.

Andrew Apuya

Andrew Apuya

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