Welcome to August 15th. The vibe is a downer and will stay that way.

August 15th, 1943, was the day my mother was born.

Had she lived, today would be her 80th birthday.

By devious and unplanned irony, August 15th is also my birthday (1969, to be exact).

It feels fitting to launch this new publication on her birthday. It was August 15th, 1994, when mother turned 51, when I realized just how little time she had left to live. She had been dying for years by that point, although we only found that out when she was diagnosed with advanced colon-rectal cancer in late 1992. Not long after I graduated college, in fact.

Seems like a blur, in retrospect. So much drama.

But this is the year she would have turned 80, and that means she died nearly 30 years ago.

Definitely seems like a blur.

That blurry rear-view mirror vision is one reason I decided to launch Patience & Fortitude. Although, to be honest, this is more of a re-launch.

I created the site PatienceandFortitude.net back in 2010 when I self-published my book Grieving Futures: Surviving the Deaths of My Parents. I’ll admit straight up that it is a depressing book, and it was more a catharsis born out of therapy than any kind of meaningful memoir.

I had, in fact, started therapy in 2008 after a major psychological breakdown, which was directly due to my inability to process my grief (and rage, and depression, and…), and part of the healing process turned into that book.

That was fifteen years ago.

The wheel has turned, again, and I am moving through a new phase of life. I am now older than my mother was when she died.

(Poppa died at 72 years old, so I have a bit of a way to go to outrun his life span. We’ll get to him eventually.)

So what can you expect?

I will be reposting chapters from my book Grieving Futures as well as older essays. The essays, at least, I plan to re-write a bit as they have not aged well. The book I hope to publish with new commentary on each chapter. Right now my goal is one update a week on Thursdays, but that might change/expand depending on my other commitments.

My goal with this revived idea is simply to share my thoughts on grief and my experiences long the journey I am still going through, so that others who are similarly surviving know they are not alone.

That’s a vague vision for this newsletter, to be honest, and so it might change as I settle in and find direction for it. We’ll see, I guess?