Your mom sounds like an amazing woman! I have just started Bless the Birds - it's touching and beautifully written. Thanks for this podcast recommendation.
She was that. She was lost to us in the months before she died (that's Alzheimer's) but she returned in the days just before her death, as brilliant and loving as ever. Thank you for reading Bless the Birds and for that lovely compliment.
"I am grateful for the grief, because it reminds me of her love for me, and mine for her." What a smile your mother had. What a sense of adventure she brought to her long life. My mother died younger than I am now, more than 30 years ago. It took a while for me to take pleasure in the sight of mothers and daughters enjoying each other's company. I felt jealous for the longest time. My mother is always with me, a consoling presence.
Oh, Rona! I am so sorry that your mom left this life so young. I can imagine how hard it was to work your way from being jealous of other mothers and daughters to realizing that your mom is with you still as a comfort and consolation. Amazing that you could get there at all, and blessings on her spirit for being with you!
May your beautiful mother live on in you always. The day after my father died, I went on a spirit walk with him in a beautiful oak savanna. As we walked, I shared with him all I had learned about the living beings around us, and why I loved them. I wanted my Dad to know me on a spirit level, and bring him into my world in a way he had not been during life. I keep an acorn from that walk on my altar.
Thank you, Carmine! She does, as does my dad, and my late husband. They are all part of me. I love that image of you walking through the oak savanna with your dad, free to share your intimate connections with him in a way you weren't able to in life. That is a beautiful practice, and I imagine that acorn still holds the powerful energy of that sharing walk.
Grief slapped me upside the head in 2009 when the love of my life died. Grieving the death of my mom in 2014 and dad in 2018 has meant grief is no longer an unwelcome stranger knocking down my door. Grief takes so many forms and is a form of gratitude for what is gone and irreplaceable. It's a package deal: love and loss.
Love and loss are absolutely a package deal, and grief is definitely a form of gratitude. Well said! I am so sorry for your decade of losses. It's interesting how ours overlap--my husband, and also the love of my life, was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2009, the year yours died. He and my mom both died in 2011, and my dad in 2018, the year yours died. The universe was clearly at a thin space in both of our lives during those years.
Your work today is powerful, inspiring, encouraging for this one on a journey to now and then peek behind the curtains at deeply lived life. As I read today, I remembered Simon and Garfunkel in the mid sixties singing, “I Am A Rock.” Near the end one finds, “I have my books, And my poetry to protect me,” How ironic! Now in 2024 I have days when that strategy, books and poems, seems like a safe bet.
“If I never loved I never would have cried.” Now I am seeing the cost of “safety” measured by few connections with Life. So as I read you and your compatriots I’m often surprised by the lack of complexities just to be. Free from a sense of criticism and rejection.
Instead, supported by love and kind gestures. Still confusing to this rock.
Thank you, Gary. Remember that a rock needs support too, whether that's poetry and books or love and kind gestures. Different days call for different coping mechanisms....
Thanks for sharing your time, Susan. I spent 30 years trying to earn entrance to AA meetings. So done in 1998. A medallion is used to celebrate time in recovery, bearing this phrase: To Thine Own Self Be True. The Serenity Prayer, a segment of the longer original, appears on the obverse. I’ll mark 26 years of continuous sobriety on Valentine’s Day. Common wisdom of the rooms suggests we’re emotionally the age we were when we became a drunk. So I’m 18 by that standard. There’s no making up for lost time. Rather living more wisely than in my drunk-a-log days. Asking for help. Choosing competent people to hang around with, digitally or otherwise.
Again, your encouragement is perceived as a generous gift. Your writing? Music of the Spheres. (Not the wind chimes bearing that name.) More along the lines of Greek mythology that regarded proportions in movement of the Sun, Moon, and Planets as a form of music. Grateful.
Congratulations to you, Gary, on your nearly 26 years of sobriety! And on living more wisely and learning to ask for help. Many people never learn that, much less the discrimination to choose friends who uplift them. And thank you for the compliments. Blessings!
Susan, I indeed considered becoming a paying subscriber. Not just because you suggested doing so. And I tried, but the disheartening message “You can’t manage subscriptions in the App” popped up despite best intentions. Any guidance for this would be great!
Thank you for thinking to support me as a paid subscriber, and I'm sorry that the app wasn't helpful. I know nothing about the process on the app, but it sounds like what that message means is you have to subscribe on the website, which means going through https://practicingterraphilia.substack.com Try that and let me know!
Yeah, unfortunately, Substack doesn’t let you manage your subscription at all from inside the app. It’s very frustrating. Follow the link Susan gave you to the page in a browser and you will be able to do it.
Thanks ever so much, Karen. I’m grateful for your help just now as well as that others have shown in my growing acclimation with Substack. My sense of a warm caring community has been an actual surprise.
I think I’m hearing lyrics from “Don’t Stop Believin’” by Journey.
That is truly the blessing of Substack, Gary. It does feel like a caring community! (And thanks for the chuckle about hearing the lyrics from "Don't Stop Believin'"!)
I'm not sure there is such a thing as normal grieving but I feel like I got cheated with both my parents–my dad's death because I was lied to about it, so even though I grieved his loss, I didn't fully understand what was going on around me because it turned out his drowning hadn't been an accident, it had been a suicide, and I didn't have a clue until nine years later, when I was 22 and stumbled across condolence letters that intimated as much. So then I endured another grieving process–grieving this story I'd held onto for more than half my life, because I didn't believe it until I was in my late 20s and saw the place where he'd drowned. When my mom died 44 years later, we had to travel across the continent for her funeral. For the first two weeks after she died, my life was filled with travel and arrangements and services (we had three, in different cities) and I finally got home and all I wanted was to be with my husband and our two young adult kids, and then, two weeks after Mom died, my then 20-year-old son wound up in a psychiatric hospital because he was suicidal, and we were on this hideous horrible roller coaster for three months during which he was discharged after all kinds of (ineffective, as it turned out) treatment and tried to kill himself again, so he went back into the hospital after two days at home. At least that time he got the help he needed, and he's good now. I never really had the time to properly grieve my mother's death in a timeline that I had longed for, but something weird happened last year that made it all better. (I think I may write about that on my Substack. But thanks for letting me share here.)
Oh, Debby! I am so sorry that you had to go through all of that. Being so young when your Dad drowned himself, and then not knowing the truth until almost a decade later, and then taking more years to absorb that new and traumatic story about his death. And then having your mom die so far away and coming home to your son trying to commit suicide twice--I am so glad he finally got the help he needed and learned new ways of being himself in the world. What a huge load of trauma to process! That said, I don't think there is any such thing as "normal" grieving. As you've found out, it's different for everyone and every situation. In my case, I didn't really have the space to grieve my mom's death even though I was there, and it happened as well as death can, because immediately after it (a week later), my husband went through the first of three brain-fluid-accumulation crises that necessitated three trips over the mountains to the hospital for three brain surgeries in the space of just over six weeks. Mom died in February, Richard died in November. Both at home, both with me as primary caregiver. Thank heavens for hospice! So I know what you mean about the roller coaster and the frenzy and feeling like you had no time to grieve. My sympathy and warm hugs to you. (And please, do write more about this on your Substack if you are so moved. We all benefit from learning about others' experience.)
I miss my darling every day, but I allowed myself to "dwell" with my grief and over a stretch of time it arrived at gratitude for the length of time I had with Vince. Which has allowed me to feel him next to me on so many occasions. Never more sharply than when I am doing a semi- or full on-long-distance drive. He's right there in the passenger seat, seeing the terrain and singing along to the music on the radio. Why? Because we loved taking road trips and taking in the scenery as we sang along with the music on the radio or the CDs of our favorite albums.
The loss of my mother and father hit me differently for various reasons. But in the last decade they have come back to me in interesting ways, mostly through their voices in my head, reminding me of things we discussed in the past, lessons learned from them at crucial times. And so the combination of my parents and my darling, who knew and loved each other, is an amazing and comforting chorus of love and support to me now, all these years later.
This is lovely, Liz! I can see you and Vince on a road-trip together, watching the landscape going by and singing with the music. What a sweet image! And bless your parents for being there for you when they were alive, and now for being there in your head, along with Vince. May their loving presence continue to be a source of comfort and delight, always.
A beautiful post, thank you, Susan. Personally, I am not yet in a place I can show grace and gratitude in/for my grief. It has been not-quite 8 months since my beloved left me after a year-long struggle with pancreatic cancer. I mourn his passing and long for his presence. Perhaps I will invite him for a walk with Kadie (his dog) and me! Fingers crossed!
I think eight months is too soon, and the loss is too fresh. Give it some time for the keen edge of the grief to be less sharp. But I do hope you'll invite him to walk with you and Kadie, and that the walk will bring you some comfort. Sending hugs your way....
Have been writing about grief in poetry since high school. And when my mom passed away unexpectedly in early 2020, I dedicated my 100 Day Project to her and telling her story. My dad passed from Alzheimer's just after my wedding in 1998, and I squashed the grief and wouldn't allow it. I was told to move on. That wasn't healthy or helpful.
With my mom I opened myself up to feel it all. To allow it and process so much. It was freeing. I talk to my dad a lot. He is always with me, in my ear like an angel reminding me of the incredible person I am and what unconditional love is. And I talk with my mom too although I think she is still busy processing her own stuff as she returns to her soul group. Grief is still always present. But it is manageable, and it has brought me so many gifts and so much growth for me as a person. It will continue to knock me on my ass each time it happens, but I think I have such a better relationship with grief and with myself. Only time will tell.
It's hard to open ourselves up to grief, but as your experience shows, it's necessary if we are to continue a relationship with those we love when they are no longer physically with us. I am glad that you have found a way to keep in touch with your dad. I chuckled at your realization that your mom is "still busy processing her own stuff." I have had that sense with loved ones in the past. Just because we die doesn't mean we've finished our business! May you continue to roll with the grief when it comes, and continue to grow and learn. It's our calling, I think to keep growing and learning and doing our best to live with love.
I honestly learned so much from your book, bless the birds. My mom died suddenly at the height of the pandemic in January 2021 and it was really the first big death close to me. The first year felt like I was in a daze the whole year. I’m in year four now and I think I’m just starting to make some peace with it.
Oh, Karen! I am so sorry about your mom's death. It's such a blow to lose a parent, and to have her die in the middle of the pandemic must have been devastating. I certainly understand how long it takes to find your way to accepting and making peace with that kind of loss. I'm glad Bless the Birds was useful to you on this journey.
Your mom sounds like an amazing woman! I have just started Bless the Birds - it's touching and beautifully written. Thanks for this podcast recommendation.
She was that. She was lost to us in the months before she died (that's Alzheimer's) but she returned in the days just before her death, as brilliant and loving as ever. Thank you for reading Bless the Birds and for that lovely compliment.
"I am grateful for the grief, because it reminds me of her love for me, and mine for her." What a smile your mother had. What a sense of adventure she brought to her long life. My mother died younger than I am now, more than 30 years ago. It took a while for me to take pleasure in the sight of mothers and daughters enjoying each other's company. I felt jealous for the longest time. My mother is always with me, a consoling presence.
Oh, Rona! I am so sorry that your mom left this life so young. I can imagine how hard it was to work your way from being jealous of other mothers and daughters to realizing that your mom is with you still as a comfort and consolation. Amazing that you could get there at all, and blessings on her spirit for being with you!
Holding your heart in mine today, friend.
Thank you, dear friend! Blessings to you....
May your beautiful mother live on in you always. The day after my father died, I went on a spirit walk with him in a beautiful oak savanna. As we walked, I shared with him all I had learned about the living beings around us, and why I loved them. I wanted my Dad to know me on a spirit level, and bring him into my world in a way he had not been during life. I keep an acorn from that walk on my altar.
Thank you, Carmine! She does, as does my dad, and my late husband. They are all part of me. I love that image of you walking through the oak savanna with your dad, free to share your intimate connections with him in a way you weren't able to in life. That is a beautiful practice, and I imagine that acorn still holds the powerful energy of that sharing walk.
Thank you for the invitation.I am grateful for the opportunity to invite Mom and Dad to walk with me in Havasu as I heal from my back surgery💜
What a wonderful way for you to heal on so many levels! May your walk with their spirits be transformative and comforting. Blessings!
Grief slapped me upside the head in 2009 when the love of my life died. Grieving the death of my mom in 2014 and dad in 2018 has meant grief is no longer an unwelcome stranger knocking down my door. Grief takes so many forms and is a form of gratitude for what is gone and irreplaceable. It's a package deal: love and loss.
Love and loss are absolutely a package deal, and grief is definitely a form of gratitude. Well said! I am so sorry for your decade of losses. It's interesting how ours overlap--my husband, and also the love of my life, was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2009, the year yours died. He and my mom both died in 2011, and my dad in 2018, the year yours died. The universe was clearly at a thin space in both of our lives during those years.
I just got your book Bless the Birds and I signed up the podcasts. Thank you so much. Blessings to you always!
Thank you, Linda! May my book and Naila and Sarah's amazing podcast be treasures to help you on your journey.
Your work today is powerful, inspiring, encouraging for this one on a journey to now and then peek behind the curtains at deeply lived life. As I read today, I remembered Simon and Garfunkel in the mid sixties singing, “I Am A Rock.” Near the end one finds, “I have my books, And my poetry to protect me,” How ironic! Now in 2024 I have days when that strategy, books and poems, seems like a safe bet.
“If I never loved I never would have cried.” Now I am seeing the cost of “safety” measured by few connections with Life. So as I read you and your compatriots I’m often surprised by the lack of complexities just to be. Free from a sense of criticism and rejection.
Instead, supported by love and kind gestures. Still confusing to this rock.
Thank you, Gary. Remember that a rock needs support too, whether that's poetry and books or love and kind gestures. Different days call for different coping mechanisms....
Thanks for sharing your time, Susan. I spent 30 years trying to earn entrance to AA meetings. So done in 1998. A medallion is used to celebrate time in recovery, bearing this phrase: To Thine Own Self Be True. The Serenity Prayer, a segment of the longer original, appears on the obverse. I’ll mark 26 years of continuous sobriety on Valentine’s Day. Common wisdom of the rooms suggests we’re emotionally the age we were when we became a drunk. So I’m 18 by that standard. There’s no making up for lost time. Rather living more wisely than in my drunk-a-log days. Asking for help. Choosing competent people to hang around with, digitally or otherwise.
Again, your encouragement is perceived as a generous gift. Your writing? Music of the Spheres. (Not the wind chimes bearing that name.) More along the lines of Greek mythology that regarded proportions in movement of the Sun, Moon, and Planets as a form of music. Grateful.
Congratulations to you, Gary, on your nearly 26 years of sobriety! And on living more wisely and learning to ask for help. Many people never learn that, much less the discrimination to choose friends who uplift them. And thank you for the compliments. Blessings!
As C. S. Lewis wrote, If you want to experience the happiness now, you have to accept the pain of loss later.
Thank you, Jim. That's a lovely reminder of why we still read C.S. Lewis....
Susan, I indeed considered becoming a paying subscriber. Not just because you suggested doing so. And I tried, but the disheartening message “You can’t manage subscriptions in the App” popped up despite best intentions. Any guidance for this would be great!
Thank you for thinking to support me as a paid subscriber, and I'm sorry that the app wasn't helpful. I know nothing about the process on the app, but it sounds like what that message means is you have to subscribe on the website, which means going through https://practicingterraphilia.substack.com Try that and let me know!
Yeah, unfortunately, Substack doesn’t let you manage your subscription at all from inside the app. It’s very frustrating. Follow the link Susan gave you to the page in a browser and you will be able to do it.
Thanks ever so much, Karen. I’m grateful for your help just now as well as that others have shown in my growing acclimation with Substack. My sense of a warm caring community has been an actual surprise.
I think I’m hearing lyrics from “Don’t Stop Believin’” by Journey.
That is truly the blessing of Substack, Gary. It does feel like a caring community! (And thanks for the chuckle about hearing the lyrics from "Don't Stop Believin'"!)
I'm not sure there is such a thing as normal grieving but I feel like I got cheated with both my parents–my dad's death because I was lied to about it, so even though I grieved his loss, I didn't fully understand what was going on around me because it turned out his drowning hadn't been an accident, it had been a suicide, and I didn't have a clue until nine years later, when I was 22 and stumbled across condolence letters that intimated as much. So then I endured another grieving process–grieving this story I'd held onto for more than half my life, because I didn't believe it until I was in my late 20s and saw the place where he'd drowned. When my mom died 44 years later, we had to travel across the continent for her funeral. For the first two weeks after she died, my life was filled with travel and arrangements and services (we had three, in different cities) and I finally got home and all I wanted was to be with my husband and our two young adult kids, and then, two weeks after Mom died, my then 20-year-old son wound up in a psychiatric hospital because he was suicidal, and we were on this hideous horrible roller coaster for three months during which he was discharged after all kinds of (ineffective, as it turned out) treatment and tried to kill himself again, so he went back into the hospital after two days at home. At least that time he got the help he needed, and he's good now. I never really had the time to properly grieve my mother's death in a timeline that I had longed for, but something weird happened last year that made it all better. (I think I may write about that on my Substack. But thanks for letting me share here.)
Oh, Debby! I am so sorry that you had to go through all of that. Being so young when your Dad drowned himself, and then not knowing the truth until almost a decade later, and then taking more years to absorb that new and traumatic story about his death. And then having your mom die so far away and coming home to your son trying to commit suicide twice--I am so glad he finally got the help he needed and learned new ways of being himself in the world. What a huge load of trauma to process! That said, I don't think there is any such thing as "normal" grieving. As you've found out, it's different for everyone and every situation. In my case, I didn't really have the space to grieve my mom's death even though I was there, and it happened as well as death can, because immediately after it (a week later), my husband went through the first of three brain-fluid-accumulation crises that necessitated three trips over the mountains to the hospital for three brain surgeries in the space of just over six weeks. Mom died in February, Richard died in November. Both at home, both with me as primary caregiver. Thank heavens for hospice! So I know what you mean about the roller coaster and the frenzy and feeling like you had no time to grieve. My sympathy and warm hugs to you. (And please, do write more about this on your Substack if you are so moved. We all benefit from learning about others' experience.)
I miss my darling every day, but I allowed myself to "dwell" with my grief and over a stretch of time it arrived at gratitude for the length of time I had with Vince. Which has allowed me to feel him next to me on so many occasions. Never more sharply than when I am doing a semi- or full on-long-distance drive. He's right there in the passenger seat, seeing the terrain and singing along to the music on the radio. Why? Because we loved taking road trips and taking in the scenery as we sang along with the music on the radio or the CDs of our favorite albums.
The loss of my mother and father hit me differently for various reasons. But in the last decade they have come back to me in interesting ways, mostly through their voices in my head, reminding me of things we discussed in the past, lessons learned from them at crucial times. And so the combination of my parents and my darling, who knew and loved each other, is an amazing and comforting chorus of love and support to me now, all these years later.
This is lovely, Liz! I can see you and Vince on a road-trip together, watching the landscape going by and singing with the music. What a sweet image! And bless your parents for being there for you when they were alive, and now for being there in your head, along with Vince. May their loving presence continue to be a source of comfort and delight, always.
A beautiful post, thank you, Susan. Personally, I am not yet in a place I can show grace and gratitude in/for my grief. It has been not-quite 8 months since my beloved left me after a year-long struggle with pancreatic cancer. I mourn his passing and long for his presence. Perhaps I will invite him for a walk with Kadie (his dog) and me! Fingers crossed!
I think eight months is too soon, and the loss is too fresh. Give it some time for the keen edge of the grief to be less sharp. But I do hope you'll invite him to walk with you and Kadie, and that the walk will bring you some comfort. Sending hugs your way....
Have been writing about grief in poetry since high school. And when my mom passed away unexpectedly in early 2020, I dedicated my 100 Day Project to her and telling her story. My dad passed from Alzheimer's just after my wedding in 1998, and I squashed the grief and wouldn't allow it. I was told to move on. That wasn't healthy or helpful.
With my mom I opened myself up to feel it all. To allow it and process so much. It was freeing. I talk to my dad a lot. He is always with me, in my ear like an angel reminding me of the incredible person I am and what unconditional love is. And I talk with my mom too although I think she is still busy processing her own stuff as she returns to her soul group. Grief is still always present. But it is manageable, and it has brought me so many gifts and so much growth for me as a person. It will continue to knock me on my ass each time it happens, but I think I have such a better relationship with grief and with myself. Only time will tell.
It's hard to open ourselves up to grief, but as your experience shows, it's necessary if we are to continue a relationship with those we love when they are no longer physically with us. I am glad that you have found a way to keep in touch with your dad. I chuckled at your realization that your mom is "still busy processing her own stuff." I have had that sense with loved ones in the past. Just because we die doesn't mean we've finished our business! May you continue to roll with the grief when it comes, and continue to grow and learn. It's our calling, I think to keep growing and learning and doing our best to live with love.
I honestly learned so much from your book, bless the birds. My mom died suddenly at the height of the pandemic in January 2021 and it was really the first big death close to me. The first year felt like I was in a daze the whole year. I’m in year four now and I think I’m just starting to make some peace with it.
Oh, Karen! I am so sorry about your mom's death. It's such a blow to lose a parent, and to have her die in the middle of the pandemic must have been devastating. I certainly understand how long it takes to find your way to accepting and making peace with that kind of loss. I'm glad Bless the Birds was useful to you on this journey.