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 …
Category: Health
Grace Notes #15: Grief at Nine Months
Ants on the bathroom counters. Kitchen cabinet door hanging loose from its top hinge. Battery dead in the Beetle in the garage. Mineral deposits on the home vaporizer rendering it almost useless. (I know I said I wasn't going to write Grace Notes anymore, but never say never. You'll see this situation requires them.) After …
Immersed in Memories
In preparation for writing my next book, I completed a tedious and heart-tugging task today. My book will be about the "adventure" Marv and I undertook last year with his seven-month process of living with a terminal cancer diagnosis and my life afterward. The starting point for the book with be the blog posts I …
Thank you, WordPress Editors and WordPress Friends!
Imagine my surprise last week when my email box showed dozens, then hundreds of notices from WordPress announcing an uptick of activity on my last blog post on my scare with breast cancer. I'm grateful to Cheri Lucas at WordPress for featuring that post under Discover, "a daily selection of the best content published on …
Continue reading Thank you, WordPress Editors and WordPress Friends!
Grace Notes #11: Grief at Five Months
This time I didn’t have to lie on the floor; this time I used the chair. The occasion? A purposeful visit to my closet. I’d awakened the day after Christmas with a feeling of optimism. I’d made it through Christmas with my eyes misting up only once, and that was during the Christmas Eve service …
Grace Notes #8 – Marv’s TANA Pledge: An End of Life Vision
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 …
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Grace Notes #6 – Grief at Three Months
I’m a grief group dropout, attending three but dropping out of two. There is no one right way to grieve. And no one can tell you if you should attend a grief group or not, or if you choose to, what kind of group to attend. Knowing this, and having a curiosity about grief groups, …
Grace Notes #5 – Outrageous
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 …
Grace Notes #4: Skating
When Marv had his first cancer, prostate, in 1999, I fell off the rails. As I was telling that story to a mutually grieving friend last week, I thought back to what a therapist told me at the time: "Sounds like you're bouncing along the bottom." Here’s the situation as I described it in Caring …
Grace Notes #3: Numb
During the prelude yesterday morning in church, when, as is custom there, most people were chatting across pews or visiting in the aisles, I suddenly wanted to dart up to the front, cocoon myself in a cozy blanket, lie under the baby grand, and absorb the vibrations while singing along in my heart: Why should …
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