A few weeks ago, when we were having a rash of notable deaths, one of my friends was asking, in her grief, whether it would just be like this from here on out. One of her icons, one of her heroes, after another. And Tim very quietly said to me, “Now would be a great time to start liking the work of artists younger than yourself. Every time is a ( Read more... )

This is in response to a locked post a friend made about how hard it can be to talk about things when you’re doing badly, without minimizing or feeling like you’re whining. I wrote most of the post and then realized that people might think I was being subtle about myself instead of reacting to a friend. But: locked post, cannot link. Sorry.

Some ( Read more... )

Today I’m wearing the shirt I bought when my grandpa was dying.

There are drawbacks to having a very sticky memory, and this is one of them: Grandpa died six years ago, and I have never once worn this shirt without thinking of the circumstances of its purchase. It’s a lovely bottle green, it’s a fabulous color for me, the fabric is soft…but it is ( Read more... )

We have all sorts of things going on, tasks and chores and ideas, attempts at healing and social things, worries and relief. And threaded over and under and around and through it is the fact that we are coming up on the fifth anniversary of my grandpa’s death. Like his mother before him, he died on March 16, cementing the next day’s St. Patrick’s ( Read more... )

In my internet wanderings, I ran into this open letter to lung cancer patients who smoked. And…I feel pretty strongly this way. I run into obits sometimes where they specify that someone died of lung cancer even though they never smoked, and I think to myself, because if they had, their families wouldn’t have permission to grieve? My grandpa ( Read more... )

I never met the man, but you can spot him at whatever age. Whether you’re watching the Weavers videos from 1951 or the concerts before the first Obama inauguration in January of 2009, Pete led with his grin. You can see immediately that it’s the same guy because he’s lifting his chin and grinning in the same way. With so many 94-year-olds, you’d ( Read more... )

I was worried, because I hadn’t heard from her at Christmas in the last few years, not even just a signed card. I made out my Christmas card list today, and when I wrote, “Marylyn,” I stopped and looked at it and hoped, and hoped, and wondered.

And tonight I find that my Marylyn died on Tuesday night.

She was my seventh grade English teacher, one ( Read more... )

About six years ago, I wrote a post about Nana and the last of her home-canned peaches. And I talked about how lucky we were to have her still, and to have her be so much herself, after what she called her "little spell" and the doctors called a hemorrhaging brain aneurism. (For those of you who don't follow the link: this is my "aunt" Kathy's ( Read more... )

Today I hit a milestone, an even bigger one than this weekend, when my number in the library's queue to check out the Downton Abbey DVDs dropped below 100: I got through another pile of Grandpa's books ( Read more... )

This has happened to me three times now: I have been waiting in line in a public place with one of Grandpa's books. And a Nice Friendly Old Fella has noticed what I was reading and commented upon it favorably, because Grandpa's books tend to be Nice Friendly Old Fella Approved ( Read more... )