My dad died last year at age 94, his death a blessing for him and, while immensely sad, a relief for me. My grief felt over too soon, but I realized it was because I’d been grieving him for years. I looked back thinking about those so-called stages of grief we learned about in Psych […]
grief
The last time I saw my brother’s dog — 14.5 years old, scruffy fur, splayed hips, milky eyes — I cupped her muzzle in my hand and told her she was a Good Girl. I had a feeling it might be the last time I would scratch her head. She stared into my eyes. Wrigley […]
Ann Finkbeiner: My son died, as did my husband; and so did parents and grandparents whom I loved dearly. I’ve written articles and LWON posts about grief, plus a book. So I consider myself a kind of expert, the kind who knows what she’s lived and read and what other people tell her. But I’ve […]
For as long as I’ve known her, my best friend has written a poem each day and then sent it out into the world. For more than a dozen years, she wrote a daily poem. On the day her teenage son ended his life, she stopped. I’d grown accustomed to opening Rosemerry’s poems in my […]
I have some unfinished business with an article I wrote. It was about grief, and it got a lot of questions and comments and though I’ve answered some already, I need to answer one more. The answer turns out to need a science metaphor. Science, which goes about its orderly business of sorting out the […]
The most tired joke of 2020, besides some variation of “has anyone tried turning it off and then turning it back on again,” is that time isn’t real. That’s because it’s not a joke, and also because I am very tired. I know I am extremely fortunate to work from home, yet I am also […]
Since I published a book about beavers two years ago, I’ve heard from dozens, maybe hundreds, of readers with their own beaver experiences to share. This is a wonderful perk of authorhood: When you tell your own story, you attract others. I’ve gotten emails from folks who have hand-fed blackberries to wild beavers, who have […]
One of our cats, the gray tabby female, hasn’t been eating well lately. We’re not sure how long this has been going on. Has it been since late February, around the time the first victim of COVID-19 in Washington State died in a hospital 10 miles from where we live in Seattle? Did it start […]