grief
Grief is the Thing with Feathers. Max Porter.
The recent death of your wife has made you a single father, so you turn to a crow for help, but the crow’s advice is hard to follow.
4 of 5 library cats 🐦⬛ 🐦⬛ 🐦⬛ 🐦⬛.
@bookstodon #bookstodon #books #fiction #poetry #grief #crows #reading #therapy #death
Juliette died last night. She was 13.
In June I posted a photo of her in a yellow unicorn party hat and called it her "second" birthday. A year before that I had spent a weekend doing some kind of CPR on her and writing her heart rate down every 30 minutes, certain she would not see Monday.
She saw fourteen more months. She walked, she ate, she ran around the flat like nothing had happened.
That post: https://dol.social/@dima/116782367532858418
Thank you to everyone who wrote something kind under it. I went back and read all of it again today.
This photo is from a boat on Lake Lucerne. A third of her life she spent here in Switzerland, and on every walk it was obvious who was walking whom.
She always got her way. She never backed down from anything, not once, not until yesterday.
❤️
#Dachshund #DogsOfMastodon #Dogs #Grief #Pets #Blog #Thoughts #Medicine #Fediverse #Mastodon #Switzerland #Death
Something I’ve learned about grief: people want to help, and sometimes that becomes advice about what you should do — cherish the memories, feel it, remember the good times, talk about it, don’t avoid it.
Most of it is said with love. But only the person grieving knows what they can handle right now.
Not going deeply into a memory isn’t always avoidance. Sometimes you can only let the hardest things back in a little at a time. A memory that may someday bring comfort can still be too painful today.
I’ve faced more this past year than most know. I’ve returned to places I dreaded and walked into rooms I wasn’t sure I could enter again. I did it. But I’ve learned to trust myself to know what I’m ready for and when.
Grief doesn’t need instructions. Sometimes the most helpful thing you can say is, “I’m here. I’m listening.”
Maybe someday the painful memories will be ones I can cherish again. I’m just not going to force myself there before I’m ready.
Rated The Invitation 6/10
What ever happened to Claire?
Rated A Quiet Place Part II 5/10
It's enjoyable but mostly forgettable. We do learn some new things about the creatures and I'm encouraged by what I'm seeing of the world-building especially where other people are concerned, but this needed to do more and with quicker pacing. It's great that it has something to say about young people and maturation but it doesn't do nearly enough to carry on the character development that was EXACTINGLY earned in the first film. A movie where Emily Blunt goes on to find her daughter and leaves the strange man to take care of her son and baby would've been a lot more interesting to me, but I also understand how that presents the potential for discontinuity. It is passable and holds things together, which is more than most sequels can so, so I really hope Part III builds on and expands the stakes. Give us more direct conflicts with and between humans, PLEASE.
Everywhere she dies. Everywhere I go she dies.
No sunrise, no city square, no lurking beautiful mountain
but has her death in it.
—Norman MacCaig, “Memorial”
from THE POEMS OF NORMAN MacCAIG (Birlinn, 2009)
Today, 30 August, is Grief Awareness Day
https://birlinn.co.uk/product/the-poems-of-norman-maccaig/
#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #NormanMacCaig #grief #GriefAwarenessDay
A year ago today, September 5, began a long decline in my life. My brother was found after lying on his floor for three days following a suicide attempt. Weeks of hospitals and difficult decisions followed, then his death, and a few months later, my dad’s.
I’m not spending today reliving it, but I’m painfully aware of everything set in motion on this date and how much life changed in the year that followed.
I’m not “all better.” But this morning my Apple Watch told me my resting heart rate has been lower for 22 days — almost exactly how long I’ve been home after two months in Michigan.
Maybe my body knows something I’m only beginning to recognize. I’m still here, moving forward. September 5 marks where that year began. It doesn’t define the year ahead.
I took this along Virginia’s Blue Ridge Parkway a couple of years ago. Today, the light breaking through the clouds feels especially fitting — a reminder that even after the darkest stretches, light finds its way in.
After a year of trauma, loss, and learning things I never expected to need, I’m thinking about writing a practical survival guide for ordinary people facing life’s upheavals.
I’d share what I learned about everything from arranging trash pickup in an unfamiliar town to checking the heat at a property a thousand miles away. I’d also cover the bigger questions, like guardianship versus conservatorship, and why an estate attorney advised me against letting a nursing home complete my loved one’s Medicaid application.
And I’d include the small things that helped me stay steady. Like how, at night, when worry kept me awake, I’d picture little filmstrips of photos I’d taken. It gave my mind somewhere else to go.
Maybe some of it could help someone else wondering where to start.
#WritingCommunity #Caregiving #Grief #MentalHealth #LifeLessons
I had been avoiding to go into my art studio so I didn't have to face my "inner voice." Today my artist friend invited me to her studio to paint together. Turns out that she also lost her husband in January, and we talked, while painting. This is something I wasn't able to do, even with my closest friend. Better than a therapy. This is one of four tiny gouaches I painted today; all from a memory.
#smallworks #grief #TakeCare #MastoArt
