The other night, I stayed up later than usual to watch the multiple Oscar-nominated film, “Terms of Endearment.” It’s a film based on Larry McMurtry’s book, with one significant difference: The film adds a major character — the middle-aged, former astronaut Garrett Breedlove (played to perfection by Jack Nicholson, who won the Oscar for Best […]
Widowed by Illness
Past and Present
The summer of 2020 was a weird and unsettling time. We were early in the pandemic and there was just a heavy feeling all around. Mario’s health was really tanking, yet he was still not acknowledging it. We’d gone on a short camping trip about 50 miles to the east. I remember we had a […]
The Season of Time
What is time, anyway? Time is how we measure and make sense of change. At its core, time is a concept we use to track the sequence and duration of events. It’s how we understand that one thing happens before or after another and how long things last. -Chatgpt Time is both strict and magical. […]
“Uncage the Soul”
This week, a local artist I know lost her son to cancer. I had been watching his story with the disease unfold for a couple years. At one point in time he owned a video production company called, Uncage the Soul (the phrase was apparently one he used to sign correspondences while he was young […]
A Case Study in Free Will
It’s been a slow week for me on the writing front, so I will give you Mario’s obituary, which I wrote on Valentine’s day, four days after The Day, because what else would I have done that Valentine’s day. I’m also a firm believer that obituaries should not be boring. Bonus points for humor and […]
“All of the Moments You Take for Granted”
Trigger warnings for death by illness and mention of suicide. I’ve recently been watching video blogs posted by Jackson Galaxy on Youtube – a guy known as the “cat daddy” who originally came to fame through being a cat behaviorist who got his own tv show, “My Cat From Hell”. The videos are documenting the […]
What is Grief . . .
. . . someone asked. a puzzle an enigma one long and unpredictable complication . . . a testament to love. grief the remnant from the flood proof that love existed love’s receipt. The poet, John O’Donohue says it best: For Grief When you lose someone you love, […]
“These dreams go on when I close my eyes.”
It’s been a week of oddball dreams in which my departed other half has shown up frequently. These particular types of dreams are powered by my subconscious mind, not by supernatural forces. From the surrealistic to the mundane, they take me on a well-trodden path. It’s almost as if my subconscious is experiencing its own […]
Endings, endings, endings everywhere
Main image by Ben Wicks on Unsplash One of my favourite “change” models (and I know quite a few) is that of Bill Bridges – and crucially, it’s called “Transitions”. I love this man’s work for so many reasons – not least because I trained for my first marathon, back in 1997, with his daughter […]
The trickiness of “How Are You?”
Image by Markus Spiske on Unsplash Yesterday, a fellow widbud, a woman I have never met but who someone connected with me, and who lost her husband just before Christmas 2022 after a very short illness, wrote the note below. I responded to her with both sharing some of my recent writing on this very […]
Selfish Thoughts
The New York Times recently published a fascinating and mainly hopeful guest essay by Kate Pickert dubbed “Is a Revolution in Cancer Treatment Within Reach?,” (See https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/16/opinion/cancer-treatment-disparities.html (June 16, 2023)). In it, Ms. Pickert describes nothing less than a paradigm shift in cancer treatment away from a long-held medical assumption “that many early-stage cancer patients […]
Time After Time After Time After Time
Photos my own This is – and will continue to be – a weekend full of experiments. A lot of my life is still versions of experimentation, if not in the ways it was immediately post-loss(es) when even just venturing out of the front door and heading to the shops felt like an experiment. This […]