Main image by Jonathan Chng on Unsplash 8th December 2020 Today I have lived 19,615 days Today, 8th December 2020, I am the exact age, to the day, that Mike was when he died Mike was born on 27th July 1963 I was born on 27th March 1967 Mike died on 8th April 2017 I… […]
Child Loss
Categories
The notion of categories has come up for me a few times these past days and weeks. Categories and rating scales. I am far from being an expert in measurement but I have designed myriad surveys in my professional decades, and even contributed to psychometric tools where, really, accurate measurement has to be a tad […]
What I Wouldn’t Give
Today is one of those days where Julia’s death, the reality of it, gets through to me… just a little bit more. Despite it always being present, always heavy in my heart, wearisome in my lungs, ponderous on my shoulders, tense in my jaw, sick in my stomach, light, shaky and trembly in my hands […]
On Love and Risk
Main image from the LA Times, July 2020 Remember when, back in the 1980s, just as we were getting sexually active (if you’re my age), and AIDS hit….? There were all those adverts, in the UK at least, on billboards, in the press, perhaps even on TV – (no social media back then), of a […]
Resilience is…
I could have gone a few different directions for this week’s writing. One was going to be about some death admin that was, in the end, straightforward and easy, if also hard. I might yet write about that, just because I do so love challenging my embedded belief that all admin (death admin) is horrendously […]
Facing Death, Embracing Life
My beautiful friend Joan, one of the very very very few people who has (a) consistently been present, (b) more or less accessible, and (c) capable of sitting with and exploring whatever colour and shade of emotional energy has come up for me these past four, very long years, co-facilitates a personal development programme called […]
My Life is Not Your Excavation Site
I had an experience yesterday which was wholly disagreeable in the moment, and of which similar versions have happened various times these past months and years. The difference was that I finally felt able to handle the situation calmly, directly, and with more resourcefulness than previous times. As I discussed it in the evening with […]
42 Moons
Main picture by Mark Tegethoff on Unsplash I have long had an uncanny ability to work out time zones (what time is it right now in Sydney where they are 8 hours ahead? Or in Minneapolis which is 7 hours behind? Or if I want a call with someone in New York and someone in […]
Long Live Live Music
Photo by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash One of the phrases that I hear, and that I use myself, in my still new, post-loss world, is “this life of after”. It’s a phrase that gets used a lot in the COVID context too. “After COVID…” or “When COVID is over…” And of course, some people are […]
From “What’s wrong?” to “What’s possible?”
Image by Leonardo Santamaria for NPR Confession: I have no idea where this piece of writing will go. Another confession: That happens quite often with these blogposts, though for sure much of my writing comes from a specific incident that has stood out during my week. Other times I latch onto a song, a poem, […]
Sliced and Diced and Cored
Main Photo by Nikolai Chernichenko on Unsplash I have written quite a bit about my challenging relationship with Death Admin. That I despise it. That it’s painful. That it takes too much time and energy and money. That it is prone to make me cry bitter, angry and hurting tears. And that most of all, […]
Dying to Live or Living to Die?
Photo by Juliana Malta on Unsplash This is my 53rd piece for Soaring Spirits which means I have been writing for a year. My gentlest year in five years. I wanted so much to be able to write that there had not been another death in my close entourage, by which I mean, the death […]