Ten years ago this month, the completed copies of Caring Lessons: A Nursing Professor's Journey of Faith and Self arrived in Chicago. I began the writing in 2000, after retiring as professor emerita of nursing from Trinity Christian College in Palos Heights, IL. After many revisions, I finished it, finally, around 2008. Then the publishing process took …
Continue reading Caring Lessons Celebrates Tenth Anniversary
My trip from the Iowa Summer Writing Festival in Iowa City coasted along from the Iowa hotel, to the airport shuttle to Cedar Rapids, to the flight to Chicago, and on to the L train headed to the Loop. Problem number one began with the announcement of L track repairs. After settling comfortably onto my …
Big news! I finished a first draft of the book I'm writing about our cancer experience. In March, when I was in Arizona, I started compiling blog posts written during that time which will serve as the frame of the story. Then I added emails that I'd written to family and friends. Way last November …
Marv passed away six months and fourteen hours ago. I'm feeling it is time for me to move on. To leave these “grace” related posts on dying and death and move increasingly toward my “new normal.” I don’t mind that expression, although I know some do. They say there will never be another “normal.” But …
Last week, when the "foreverness" of my loss threatened to plunk me down, I received an uplifting reminder of Marv's ever-present optimism. In his final weeks, he sprang his idea of a TANA pledge on me. TANA is Trinity Christian College's nursing alumni association. I, of course, gave him at least a dozen reasons why …
Continue reading Grace Notes #8 – Marv’s TANA Pledge: An End of Life Vision
At book club last week, we finished Joan Chittister’s The Gift of Years: Growing Older Gracefully. Many things in the book resonated with me, but I needed her chapter on “Future” right now as I emerge from the two-month mark of being a widow (there, I said the word I don’t like, but it seems …
A Chicago friend sent a photo of this cover from Fourth Presbyterian’s bulletin: I’m in Nouwen’s “trusting” stage. Our Celebration of Life Service for Marv is Saturday at 11am at Westminster Presbyterian. It’s been just twelve days since he passed away. Many family members and friends are coming to town, plus new friends and church …
This devotional today from our former church in Chicago is appropriate as our family strives to be present for Marv during his final days. He’d rather we not “hover” over him, however, and let him mow our daughter’s lawn, water our flowers, work at his computer, and build a cart yet, from a golf cart …
We are taking time off from cancer. Not really. But we've been pleasantly distracted with a few-day visit from friends, and while they were here, we visited Pipestone National Monument in Pipestone, MN, about an hour from our home. From the Monument's website: For countless generations, American Indians have quarried the red pipestone found at …
“Be open to God’s work in your lives,” our minister said Sunday. He concluded by saying don’t put God in a box. When we stood in line to shake his hand after church, I said Marv’s continued good health reminds me that God is not in a box. God is working outside of any box …
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