Patience & Fortitude

Facing the emptiness

I wrote Grieving Futures back in 2010, and threw it up online pretty quickly. It served as a cathartic bleed out of my emotions regarding my experiences with grief, and as tool in helping to reach out to other grievers. It lives up to its dual purposes, I think. But...

Be free, be free

The phrase “Let go and let God” has a lot of cultural currency. When people are facing overwhelming trauma, be it grief or drug addiction or a bad day at work, the phrase is pulled out to help people untangled their emotions and let go of what is troubling...

Planning for the end…badly

I have absolutely no idea how I stumbled over the Secular Celebrations & Humanist Ceremonies website, but I did. It is open on a tab in my browser and I have no idea why, but maybe that’s a good thing. I remember planning for my mother’s funeral, which was held in...

The Troy Syndrome

Over at Planet Grief, Helen Bailey wrote an evocative and emotional post, Life, Death and Laundry, about post-death hoarding. She talks about keeping things long past their “due date” and her unwillingness to wash the bedsheets she had once shared with her...

Gratitude in the Void

Today in the United States of America, it is Thanksgiving, but in truth there are many things I’m not grateful for. Such as, the deaths of my parents. No, I will never be grateful for that. Thanksgiving is the holiday I remember most from my childhood.It was the...

Remembering is better than prayer

I was one of the thousands of fans whose morning was consumed by the release/leak of the Avengers movie gag reel. If you don’t know, just take my assurances about the fact that I am a crazy fangirl for the movie and let me just add #COULSONLIVES. But then I got...