My Mom: A Half Year Later

When my mom showed me this photo of her when I was about her age, I had a hard time believing it was her. The little girl in this photo has blonde hair and I’ve always known her to have dark brown hair like me. I’ve never had hair that light, but granted her hair might seem so fair because of the lighting, the camera work of the early post-war years, the black and whiteness of the photo.

We Do Not End When We Die

This past year has been quite the ride in loss and creating space. My father passed away suddenly of a heart attack in September of 2016. While he was in his 80s and he’s been gradually slowly down in the last decade and he was in rehab for weakness following a hospital stay, the death was sudden, raw and jarring. He was due to come home on Monday and he passed suddenly on Saturday, just 2 days before he was to get his biggest wish, to be at the home he built with my mom and had lived there for 49 years. But he got the next best thing, he passed quickly with my mom, his wife of 56 years, at his side.