Category: grief
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A tribute to Roxie
Fayteen and her family are still grieving for their beloved dog, Roxie. Since Roxie died recently, we have been thinking about how much our animals teach us about life and love. They are always eager to greet us in the morning, always ready to sit quietly by our side, always ready to comfort us when…
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So many amazing things
I just read Wild by Cheryl Strayed again before my book club discussed the book. I was impressed by Strayed’s tenacity. Even though her boots were too small and her backpack was too heavy and the snow was too slippery, she kept hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. On her journey, she remembered her mother’s death…
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How suffering takes place
A very good friend died yesterday, and I have been feeling sad and thinking about the sadness her family is feeling. Recently, when I heard Natasha Trethewey, this country’s poet laureate, read a poem by W.H. Auden on National Public Radio, I knew exactly what Auden was writing about. I listened and remembered clearly one…
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The first lesson of grief
A friend died. She was past 100. She was a friend, but not a close friend. I still felt sad. As I thought about my friend’s death, I remembered my mother’s death. In her book She Matters: A Life in Friendships, Susanna Sonnenberg writes that the first real lesson about grief is “its disorganizing confusions,…
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Accepting your limits
How do you react when you fail or are disappointed? When something bad happens over which you have no control? I was sad when I heard of a friend’s friend who gave birth to a stillborn baby. I remembered my own sadness when I struggled with infertility for four years before my daughter was born…
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The death of Anthony Shadid
When I turned on my computer to my Yahoo news page and saw the picture of Anthony Shadid and read that he had died at 43, I was at first shocked and then deeply saddened. Anthony, of course, was The New York Times foreign correspondent who died of a fatal asthma attack in Syria. He…