My earliest memories are of my Grandmother, Fairy Belle. She was very present in our lives and for a time, lived with us. I remember coming home from school and watching Another World and All My Children (or as she called them, her “stories”). But mostly I remember her in the kitchen. My love of … Read more
Spring cleaning has become almost a biological ritual. The winter has gone, the windows are open and we suddenly want to give the house a freshening up. We wash, we dust, we sort. Some things are tossed or re-homed. But what if we cleaned, not with the birth of a new season in mind, but use our own death as motivation instead.
Holidays can be difficult when you are missing and grieving someone. But it seems a bit harder when it’s your mom. Usually it is our mothers who organize family dinners and events, so when she’s gone, how do we approach the holiday without her? The folks at Cake have a website of resources and tools to help with grief and end of life and general “navigating mortality”.
“Tattooing one’s grief can be an act of resistance to the notion that grief can or should be cured … The act of tattooing suggests that grief is permanent and that it is life-long, visible, and always present.” For some, memorializing their loved one with a tattoo is a way to keep a part … Read more
We are living in a sad and confusing time, especially for a child. From COVID to the Ukraine, we are saturated with loss. And even if your child has been spared the horrors of the nightly news, the odds are they will experience, at some point, the death of a pet or grandparent or family member or friend or teacher or…. Grief and loss are part of life, but how do we talk to our children about it?
There is a good chance that you know someone who is facing the imminent holiday with impending dread. It’s hard to know what to say to a friend who is grieving, and the holidays can be a particularly difficult time to face. There are ways to help (or not!) but the main rule is to follow the lead of the person who is grieving.
When Charmaine Haddad’s parents were both gone, the family still had items and clothing that had belonged to their mom and dad. Charmaine’s sister, Charlotte, took her mother’s fur coat and her father’s suede one and commissioned a local craftsperson to create Christmas heirlooms. The result was a combination of Santas that the family can … Read more
If you had told me a few years ago that thinking and talking about death would make my life better, well, I might have just died from shock.
It is because of my grave gardener mom that I’ve grown to become a death-positive woman. I’m a woman who considers death a part of life.
