Anniversary

Another One

As spring storms came and went this last week, so too did my waves of grief. Under branches laden with wet snow, I was transported back to the drive I took eight years ago, pulling into the driveway where my father no longer would be. Walking in the solid front door, that year, I hugged my brother and we sat and stared, not sure what to do before the family descended. I made inappropriate jokes. I choked, I’m sure, on my words, and my spit. When a few relatives showed up, we ordered Chili’s and tried to chew.

And this year, making the same drive, a toddler babbled in my backseat, unfamiliar with our family patterns or notions of a death anniversary. While the wounds are no longer seeping, their marks still remain. We ate cheeseburgers at the same table we sat at eight years ago, although its parallel orientation in the room now is just enough disruption to remind us that, yes, we all have changed.

I’m pleased to be on the downward slide towards April. While my body is remembering, exhaling, and less tense, I find gentle reminders that this week, every year, will be tough. It’s cocky to think otherwise. For when you lose a metaphorical limb, a figure head, a family anchor, the phantom limb still quakes.

I found my father in the discounts I received at the gas station and in the eyes of the hawk that sits above us, perched on the light post we pass every morning on our way to drop off. In the way my brother says hello when he comes up the stairs. In the sweatshirts we took out of bottom drawers, musty in their comforting embrace.

I wanted to write something more pleasant, lighter, more free. I no longer feel like grief is a ball and chain, though I can feel the scars from the cuffs on my ankles. So, yes, it was a hard week. Naming that in exhale is importantly beautiful.

And, two friends had babies, and the afternoon light pours in, gracing the plant I almost killed out of neglect with a second chance at surviving. My fingers continue to clack across the keyboard, and thoughts fill my head and my heart. We look towards Easter. Another time of resurrection. We made it through another one. And that is a beautiful thing.

An Anniversary – 10 Things Seeking Beauty Has Taught Me

This little blog turns ten this year. Thanks to the archive, I know I wrote 47 posts that first year in 2014. In 2022, after welcoming a new baby, I only wrote twelve. Life, and its demands, have changed a bit. I did write slightly more in 2023, but certainly not at the weekly rate, and I’m not sure what 2024 will have in store. I worry about sharing my free ideas with ChatGPT, and how artists and writers are compromised with the advance of AI. I weigh sleep over exercise, and sending emails over creating new content. Regardless, in this ten year journey, the continued practice of seeking the beautiful as the world continues to grow more connected and more tumultuous has brought a multitude of gifts.

For this first post of 2024, I’m sharing ten things the pursuit of beautiful things has taught me in the last ten years.

The world, perhaps, has always been a little bit messed up. Still, there is joy. Pay attention.
R.E.M once quipped “It’s the end of the world as we know it (and I feel fine.) Since the beginning of time the sky has been falling, things are shifting, and changing. And yes, in the last ten years things have felt bleaker, heavier, and perhaps more important than the previous ten. And I believe, you see what you look for. Turn off the news. Bring cookies to a neighbor. You, too, can create joy. What do you need to do to feel fine?
Hope takes practice.
Our brains are programmed to seek out the negative. It keeps us safe. I’ve learned, however, in a world that constantly feels dangerous, finding beautiful things keeps me feeling hopeful and optimistic. Hope, for me, is a practice of choosing the good, over and over again. Beauty expands when we seek it repetitively.
Most people are in some type of pain. Expressing it helps.
Our culture sucks at finding words for difficult experiences. Each of us are suffering in some way and we’re told to keep that pain to ourselves or in quiet rooms where professionals help you problem solve. I’ve found so much community and belonging with people who are able to hold both beauty and pain, side by side, as we work towards healing. I’m not alone.
Awe is an underrated experience.
How much of life we take for granted. When I really stop to think about all the things that do go right on any given day, I’m filled with awe. Yesterday, I watched my daughter chase bubbles across a winter lawn. Her grasping for tiny purple orbs while squealing with delight brought me back to a grounded place. A tiny human chasing soap. Amazing.
We need each other.
Americans like to believe we are independent. Grief, Covid, and motherhood have taught me that while our experiences are unique, there are common threads to the human experience that can connect us if we let it. We need each other. We need soup and phone calls and texts and connection. We need reminders that when things are heavy, others can shoulder the weight of both our worlds and the big ol’ world. And when things feel light, we need to invite others to dance with us in the rays of goodness. Beauty expands when it is shared.
Not everyone will grow with you. That’s ok.
In the last ten years, I changed jobs and I said a lot of good-byes. Co-workers moved on, friends moved, and some family members stopped responding to texts. I made short-term connections and cried when people I thought would stick around didn’t. Not everyone is growing in the same way you are, and that’s ok. This truth doesn’t detract from the beauty individuals bring in different chapters along the way.
Chin Up, dear.
In times of transition, stress, and distress, it’s easy to get tunnel vision and forget what else is going on that is positive. When I’m feeling bleak, I remind myself to cup my own face and say, “Chin up, dear.” The slight tilt up brings a different perspective at the reminder that while my situation may be less than ideal, somewhere across the way someone else is experiencing great joy. Coffee is being brewed, friends are hugging at airports, babies are being born.
The practice is worthy
Yes, I have dreams of turning this project into a book, and it would be nice to be discovered. Perhaps all artists want to be found. But, I’ve learned that weekly writing, or as it has devolved to less, is still worthy of existing. I don’t need an agent or a book deal or a long newsletter list for the work to matter. Even if the posts bring in only 54 cents a month. To know the posts meet at least one each week still bring the work worth. The dedication to the project and how it has transformed me is worth enough.
Beauty is often quiet.
There’s a lot of noise out there. Returning to the beautiful often takes the deliberate choice to turn down the noise and to tune into what you know to be true. Witnessing may require calm. Beauty doesn’t demand attention and it doesn’t yell. It’s in the silence that we may be moved to tears.
Now, more than ever.
People are so scared. People are so beautiful. Now, more than ever, I believe we can use the pursuit of beautiful things to connect us with compassion and grace. Humans have capacity for both darkness and light. And I believe, when we train ourselves to look for the beautiful, we can change ourselves and in turn, trickle out to change the world.

Here’s to the continued search and however many posts come next.

When the Fog Rolls In

It took seven years for the words to come more slowly. Muddled in fog, the memories pull my tongue back into my mouth, trying to make full sentences when the dryness comes at the beginning of March.

There are still words for the sadness and they are taking longer to take shape this year. In the stretching of letters into sentences, my brain seeps into places we used to live together. So much has changed.

This week we both sized up my baby’s car seat and moved down her mattress in the crib. We put up baby gates and took down too-small jackets into the basement. They told me this would go fast, and again, as the fog of new parenthood has lifted, I find myself bouncing up and down to catch up with her growth.

However, a familiar front has rolled in, bringing in old stagnant air of grief, and as the mixing air swirls around us, pushing the blur of her infancy into, well, the past. I can’t believe we’re coming up on a year of baby, and seven years without Dad.

Life happens as we live it. In the bouncing up and downs there’s now wine at the grocery store, cookies with crumb baked in, and baby babbles on the monitor as we wake up in the morning. There’s the ache of not knowing a parent as a friend, of watching others grow and wondering how we ever moved so far in different directions. There’s the putting on of his old sweatshirts and slippers, fingering tears in the worn brown sleeves, as you sit and you watch, chest upon knees, as the grief fog returns.

Seven years, and the words have slowed. The settling, the acceptance, the stillness of grief’s truth, all beautiful things.

Every once in awhile, I’ll ask readers and friends to do something kind in honor of Roy. Sometimes I’ll ask on his birthday. In other years, the day of his death. This week, please commit a random act of kindness in his honor. Buy the person behind you in the drive thru’s coffee. Send that card you’ve been waiting to send. Thank a nurse. Bring donuts to work. Clean up your socks even if you don’t want to.

Please email me or tag me on social media when you do and we’ll create a little bit of sparkle on a real sad Saturday. Do something kind. Help the fog lift. Make memories of Roy into beautiful things.

Every Seven Years?

A friend recently told me that the human body regrows every cell within seven years. As March approaches, yet again, with a large flashing seven over the 18th, the day of Dad’s death, I started to wonder, “Has every part of me replaced itself since that day?”

A quick Google search helped me conclude, it depends. Some cells re-grow quickly. Those found in human hearts are said to lag. And in our brains, some cells never replace themselves. More on the science here.

Head. Heart. Body. Three domains we will live and experience the world in. I’m comforted by the fact that cells still in my heart were around when Dad was still with us. And in neurons and tissues in my head, memories linger for a life time.

There’s that old Gershwin tune, reflecting on lost love:

“We may never never meet again, on that bumpy road to love
Still I’ll always, always keep the memory of

The way you hold your knife
The way we danced till three
The way you changed my life
No, no they can’t take that away from me
No, they can’t take that away from me.”

Sure, this was meant as a love ballad, but for me, I’m starting to worry about the things that seep away as we keep moving forward.

Skeletons take eleven years to regenerate. Parts of my bones still know him. And the metaphors we humans use to try and comprehend our human experience sink into my essence and pass on to my daughter.

She has eye balls and ear balls. That’s what Papa would have told her. Those eyeballs take on the shape of her grandfathers.

We carry in our bodies living systems of memories and wants and aches and our humanity. And when pieces of that human experience get lost, we turn our attention to what we can grow instead. Why must transition be so ladened with sadness? Why do we focus on what can be created to fill in the gaps?

In a recent coaching session, my coach asked “What if you can hold both? The grief and the growth?”

A strong image came to me of a small sunflower, bravely lifting a heavy center surrounded by pedals unfurling. The flower turn its head a different direction. The sun isn’t over there anymore, I thought.

In order to hold both, in my little growing pot, I need to turn my head to a new source of sun.

I’m growing, regenerating, creating life and seeking nutrients. And still, pieces of me remain the same.

I suppose the both-and is a beautiful place to be. A lagging heart. A brain that holds memories. All beautiful things.

Does Not Have to Be

Reminders from Facebook and Google Photos distract me from what I ought to be doing.

With each “On this day last year” alert, I’m jolted back in time. Sometimes one year. Other times four.

My phone told me on this day last year, I was sipping strong coffee out of small cups in Cuba. Warming in the sun, our guides told me to put on sunscreen. My see-through skin (their words, not mine) needed protection.

When I returned, one week later, I packed up my desk and transformed a bedroom into an office. I haven’t left this space much since. What unraveled has frayed into the thousands of stories we all now carry from living during a pandemic. Instagram is exploding with memes comparing March 2020 to March 2021. Will they be similar? Will the month hold the same amount of uncertainty, trauma, and loss as last year? Few fail to talk publicly about the trauma we are collective digesting right now.

With each announcement of a friend or colleague getting a vaccine, I can feel adrenaline swish within me. Yes, I want to be safe and I know when the people I love get to the front of the line, I’ll weep with relief. What their proclamations fail to hold, however, is the hurt we’ve been carrying and the continued wait so many of us still face.

I want to say, “Congrats. You’re out in the world. I’m not quite there yet. And can you get my mom to the front of the line?”

Sinking back in the black office chair, I meditate myself back to March 2017. I cautiously move back through time, recalling glimpses of how I felt one year after Dad’s passing.

I was intentional about doing everything different, as if the clothes I wore, or the food I ate could prevent a chain reaction leading to another disaster. I remember I was house sitting. My family had decided to spend the day apart. Our collective pain was too much to bear. I think it was grey. I wasn’t sure how to create something new in his absence. Maybe I went for a walk?

Eventually, I ended up at my mom’s house, perched on the wicker bar stool in the kitchen.

Staring at the sink, I coached myself out of a place of hopeful desperation, “March 18th of this year does not have to be March 18th of last year. Does it?”

Anniversaries are important. Marking what you’ve been through is vital to honoring the growth you’ve endured as time passes. The phrase, “does not have to be” frees our spirits from the tethers connecting us to our past traumas.

This March, I find myself triggered as we all reflect on the anniversary of a pandemic year. Whether you mark the start of the shut downs this week, or next, we all have been absorbing the trauma of 2020 for quite some time. Memes and comedians and politicians poke at my fears. Who would ever want to relive a month like that again?

This March does not have to be like last March.

Feel sad. Feel hopeful. Feel envious of those who are vaccinated.

Do not, however, dwell in the impending doom of waiting for last year’s next shoe to drop.

You’ve grown in this darkness. I promise. Even if events unfold in ways you don’t want this March, you are not the same person as you were in March of 2020. This March will not be last March. What a beautiful thing.

Roll With It

Tonight, I walked in the door to snow covering my living room floor.

Flakes the size of paper towels mixed with fibers of carpet.

Wait. No. Not snow. Just paper towels. Shredded. All over two stories of my house.

This has happened before, as once Dylan and I forgot to pick up the paper towel roll from the floor that we use to clean up after our damn dog.

She did it again.

Snow. Covering the whole living room.

In that moment, as in most, I had two choices.

Get mad and yell at the dog.
Roll with it.

I chose to roll with it. I stuck her outside and headed up stairs, unloaded my stuff, sat and stared at the mess. I called a friend, she didn’t answer so I left a voicemail instead.

And then I opened up my inbox to attend to an exiting offer I’ve been procrastinating on because I’m scared. Called that phone number, left another message.

Then I went to my kitchen, got a huge garbage sack, and picked up all the snow… er, paper towels. Shreds.

People keep offering advice on how to combat our dog’s anxiety. Doggy day-care, Rover, CBD treats, take her to work. I’ve got a reason most of those won’t work. What do I do instead? I roll with it.

Somethings don’t need immediate fixing.

roll

I haven’t been writing much here because I’ve been processing in my head. Two weekends ago, I lived through another anniversary of Dad’s death. I wonder if it will be like this every year – waking and wondering who will text me that day. Some folks I thought for sure would speak up stayed quiet. Odd how such a significant day can go unmarked for so many people I know who lost him too.

Other surprising me people asked if we have traditions to mark the day? No traditions yet, we’re only on year two. I think it takes at least three years of doing something to make it a tradition. They knew I was dreading that day.

The 18th.

Ugh.

I woke on Sunday, March 18th and Psalm 118:24 came into my head.

This is the day that the Lord has made;
let us rejoice and be glad in it.

It was not March 18, 2016. That day sucked. It was now March 18, 2018. This day did not have to suck. I wondered how to go about marking the day, honoring Dad, and living in the present.

I had choices.

Sit, grieve, feel sad and somber.
Get outside, live, do things in remembrance of him. Roll with it.

Honestly, I did a little bit of both.

Without a plan, and a little less pain than the previous year, I didn’t have an agenda when I woke up. I wanted to feel good and alive. I needed to feel like I was rolling with the huge, sucker-stomach punch that I was faced with when Dad left this world.

I sat and felt sad for an hour. I wrote him a letter with tears streaming down my face. I drank my coffee and I felt his absence and smiled when a friend sent me flowers. Again. Then I got up and we left the house.

I made Dylan go to Dunkin’ Donuts with me and we bought three. One for me, one for him, one for Dad. We went to a park nearby – the one where Dad taught me to ice-skate, and we played trolls, and the one he could see from his office window in the last few years of his life.

I sat on a bench eating my chocolate glazed with sprinkles, hoping for a break in the crowds. Dylan poked me in the side, whispering, “Go!” and I scurried under the branches, donut in hand.

I left an Old-Fashioned cake tucked in the mouth of that alligator statue, where Dad would have looked when he usually walked by.

I hate vandalism and public littering and breaking all rules. I felt like the branch I hit my head on when running back to Dylan was a bit of karma. I felt good and I smiled. Dad would love this. He’d laugh. And he’d probably say, “Well that was a waste of a perfectly good donut.”

We went to dinner later that night, at the house I grew up in. My grief-molded family moved in our new forms and made big ol’ bacon burgers and beans. We sat at this old table and chewed sacredly, quietly without him.

We laughed and were proud of our choices that led us to this second year date.

A constant, patience testing, grace-filled, beautiful choice. To roll with it.

Self Care for the See Ya Laters

Happy Labor Day! I for one am enjoying the opportunity to stay in my pajamas until eleven am. I have plans for coffee, and reading a book, and having dinner with friends. That is what days off should be about. I am procrastinating some fairly large tasks for the week ahead, and saying “Today, I choose self care.” The anxiety of what I should be accomplishing to manage my life can begin tomorrow.

This weekend I bought a Real Simple Magazine. One of the articles was talking about how hard it can be to make friends as an adult. I was shocked by a stat that said that on average, people change groups of friends every seven years. While I love my friends dearly, I thought to myself, hmm, its almost time for a new batch of friends. I simply mean that life choices and changes, especially in the second half of your twenties, draw you away from your tribe created in college and perhaps the terrifying years of when you are all moving home and floating a little bit. When you pass over twenty five, we all start to seem a little bit more ‘legit’ – whatever that means – and these legitimate choices of career, and partners, and lifestyle preferences push friendships into the great unknown. As a loyal person, this makes me sad. As a realist, this makes me understand, ‘heck, these changes have nothing to do with me as a person, it just happens.’

This past month I said “see ya later” (not good-bye – that is too final) to three friends going off to grad school – Boston, California, Scotland. I had friends start new teaching jobs, new outdoor adventure jobs, and I chose to leave behind a tribe when I started a new job – even if the location is literally across the street. Through all of these swinging doors I’m learning how to take care of myself. I’m trying to ignore comparison, sending light and love across the country, and gaining new pen pals. Also choking back a sob, a healthy sob, that we are entering into the next new chapter of life with threads still connecting us.

It is easy for me, in times of change, to beat myself up. I feel I should have a better handle on the unknown outcomes of my choices. My therapist gently reminded me that it is ok to be anxious about some of these changes – I’ve never done them before. My need to be perfectly predicting is preposterous. So this week, I’ve adopted this beautiful mantra above and allow myself to cultivate new thoughts as I change and grow at rates un-measureable. I didn’t create the image above, just took it from Pinterest, so to whomever did – I love it.

Also this week was my first wedding anniversary! Hard to believe 365 days have already gone by as a wife. It is so fun to celebrate and reminisce about one of the best days of my life. I know there are many more good days to come. We spent the day at the farmers market, bopping around town with a latte in hand, and looking in shops, admiring beautiful things. We went to our favor restaurant for dinner and exchanged small gifts. My favorite part, though, was coming home and watching a movie, sharing a whole bottle of prosecco and nibbling on Cheez-Its. Word to the wise – don’t get the reduced fat.

There is a lot of pressure to make a first anniversary astounding. I’d say we had a great day, but it was the little snack of crackers and bubbles with my man that made my beautiful heart oh, so happy.

52 Beautiful Things

An imperfect attempt to find some beauty the world has to offer. One week at a time.