for Finn
Your father baked you a carrot cake.
I lit a candle, but we didn’t blow it out.
We let it burn by the window for hours.
I picked dahlias and sunflowers.
Arranged them in a mason jar.
We brought them to the cemetery.
Your death is never not hard.
Of course, we cried, sitting in the grass.
The dates on your tombstone never change.
People walking their dogs walked past.
Your dad and I held hands.
We called your sister. We talked to you.
When the sun came out, I sighed.
I had thought I was already softened.
The late warmth softened me more.
Softening, it seems, is its own reward.
When we left, I was so tender with ache
and sweetness, the light, it went right in.
I won’t blow it out. Not ever.
Posts Tagged ‘grief’
On Your Twenty-Second Birthday
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged birthday, cemetery, grief, light, mother on September 12, 2026| 5 Comments »
Because Today Vulnerable Feels Alive
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged grief, hiking, rain, vulnerability on August 15, 2026| 4 Comments »
It felt so good to walk in the rain,
to walk in the rain and not put
on the raincoat I’d carried for
over ten miles, to not put on
the raincoat and let the rain
soak into my sleeves, my
shoes, my thoughts, my
words, let rain soak in
and realize with each
squishy step each
soggy word what
a gift it is to not
always protect
myself from
the world.
Five Years Ago
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged compassion, grief, mother, past, son, suicide on August 13, 2026| 28 Comments »
Everyone else has gone to bed.
A boy and his mother sit
at the table in the house
they are renting for a few
more days. They are familiar
the way my eyes are familiar.
He sees a large cockroach
climbing the wall, and when
his mom squeals, he gets up,
grabs it, throws it to the ground
with youthful efficiency,
then smiles at his mother,
a tender smile that says,
I like taking care of you, mom.
But the boy is not happy.
Soon he is crying. His eyes
are empty, colorless, black.
Then it is only the mother
sitting at the table, her
empty hands full of fear,
uncertainty, lack. Why
do I return to this moment,
knowing I cannot change
what happens the next day?
The closet. The gun. The choice.
I go back to slip my hands beneath
the mother’s empty hands,
making for them a nest,
then sneak up the stairs to the boy
in his room in his bed in his pain,
and though I know it will not change
a thing, I whisper in his ear,
there is nothing you can do
that will keep me from loving you.
Eco-Grief
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged eco-grief, grief, hiking, mountains on July 17, 2026| 4 Comments »
My favorite alpine skinny dipping hole
a dry rock bed, an inverted monument
to drought—
as if I needed one more reminder
of how fragile it is, this world,
how parched our hearts
can become.
On the long hike home
I swim in the seriousness
of what is not here,
remember how it felt to slip
into the snowmelt,
how my whole being shivered in elation,
how the earth itself was so alive.
Keep Going
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged cemetery, grief, love, mother, night, Telluride on July 11, 2026| 3 Comments »
The sky is already past deep rose
verging on bruised plum by the time
we enter the cemetery gates
and walk up the hill to the grave
where the ashes of the boy I love are buried.
I’ve never been here so late.
Didn’t know the flag pole was lit
from below so it looks like a candle,
a tall slender flame, flaring up at the end
of a long, dark canyon. Didn’t know
how the night itself makes a quiet cocoon
for meeting the dead past the limits
of light, a shadow so generous it makes
equal room for sorrow and love to move in.
It’s not a voice, but it is, that says,
You can never lose me.
It’s not a touch, but it is, the invisible hand
that leads me back toward home.
Untranslatable
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, grief, language, silence on July 8, 2026| 4 Comments »
The language of grief is silence.
—Maggie Anderson, “What Grief Does”
No one can translate the language of grief.
No verbs properly express how it collapses
past, present and future into a single tense
in which all becomes unswimmable wave
and at the same time immovable stone.
No way to explain how in my grief lexicon
the word cello can only be spoken in sob.
How the single word shadow is somehow
an entire prayer, equal parts praise and lament.
How there are as many translations for loss
as there are losses, and each phrase mutates
into infinite local dialects spoken fluently only
by the individual who grieves. So perhaps
it is true, the language of grief is silence—
a mother tongue we are all gifted from birth.
Though sometimes the language of grief is wail.
Sometimes sniffle. Howl. Murmur. Hum.
So different, this language, for everyone.
And every moment, a new nuance unfolds.
It’s a wonder we understand each other at all.
Except we do. We share it, this language
we can’t possibly translate and yet we know its
expressions by heart. For this, we offer each other
our ears, knowing full well we can never
wholly understand, knowing full well it matters
that we listen anyway to gurgle, moan, silence, cry.
Homeopathy
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged candle ritual, dark, grief, healing, light on June 22, 2026| 8 Comments »
In the morning,
I light the candles.
With each light,
I say the names.
Each name represents
a blessing that became
a wound that became again
a blessing. This is how
the heart makes of its losses
a salve, touching again
and again the dark
with its own dark, then
adding the smallest of lights
until light is what a heart
does.
Sometimes When You Don’t Know What to Say
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, grief, ineffable, language, paradox, silence on June 1, 2026| 8 Comments »
It’s because to try to describe this feeling is
to render it instantly dull, flat.
It’s like when you see a rock on the bottom
of the river—all shimmering and bright—
but the moment you bring it to the air
to share it, what seemed precious
becomes cloudy, mundane, a dumb lump,
the stuff of filler in a suburban parking lot.
And so you learn to be quiet, to let your syllables
float away like dry leaves. What is heaviest
stays. Does not wash away. Is polished by friction, years.
Sometimes you meet others in the river. What shines
shines. Together you stare, stunned by the damn beauty.
Maybe you hold hands. Watch the light as it plays.
How the Communication Works Now
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged communication, grief, invisible, loss, love on May 29, 2026| 4 Comments »
Tonight I can’t see the shape of the moon
behind a cluster of clouds, but I see
the bright radiance seeping through the edges
and know the moon is there—
that is how it is when I speak out loud
to my father and son. Hi Dad, I say.
Hi Finn. I love you. I miss you.
And aren’t you so proud of our girl?
As I walk through the dark, scent of rain
in each breath, I can’t hear the shape
of their words in my ears. But I swear,
I feel it, the shine.
Intention
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged grief, growing, growth, intention, loss on May 22, 2026| 10 Comments »
In the garden, fill a hole with water,
eventually it will drain. Fill it with trash,
with poor soil, nothing—or weeds—
will grow. But fill the hole with topsoil,
intentional seed—is it any wonder
something beautiful eventually thrives?
Consider the hollow left when a loved one
is gone. Nothing will ever be the same as it was.
But if I protect the hollow, allow into it,
more feeling, more love, more honest connection,
if I sow there whatever goodness I grieve,
then how deep the roots might go. How true,
the sapling, its leaves so verdant,
so heartachingly new, so unashamedly green.
At the Table of Loss
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, grief, loss on May 13, 2026| 2 Comments »
As many chairs
as humans.
No way to refuse
what we are served.
We choke on
the courses.
How is it they
nourish us?
Beneath the table,
we hold hands.
What the Heart Knows
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, car, control, grief, safety on May 11, 2026| 51 Comments »
In every moment, there is a car
and an infinite hill and the chance
you will roll down that hill. With no brakes.
Backwards. When grief first yanked me
into its old beater, I was too stunned
to try to stop gravity from doing what
gravity does. Mostly, these days,
I forget what can happen. Mostly,
there’s a rope attached to the car
that keeps it from careening, a rope
made of friendship, of family,
of trust in the self that has grown over time.
The rope is a lovely illusion.
Sometimes I fool myself into believing
that the stability I feel is because
the brakes are fixed and I’ve become
better at parking, even in the steepest zones.
I fool myself into thinking the rope can’t be cut.
That is why, perhaps, it’s so surprising
when I feel the lurch, my stomach rising
into my chest. So surprising to see loss
is sitting in the driver’s seat looking
at me with its uncompromising gaze
as if to say, No, sweetheart,
that seatbelt won’t do you any good.
If you pray, now’s a good time for that—
but don’t bother to pray for the car
to stop. Pray to be able to laugh
as we speed down the hill.
Pray that as the world blurs by,
while terror squeezes your throat
what is most alive in you also notices
how radiant the sunset, how briefly
it shines, that tender pink.
A Small Lesson in Infinity
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged grief, loss, mother, mother's day on May 10, 2026| 10 Comments »
after “Flower in a Field” by Dario Cvencek
A mother is still a mother
even in an empty house,
even when there’s not a child
hanging on her hip or leg,
she’s still a mother even when
the floors are clean, devoid
of Legos and Monopoly houses.
Even when silence
fills the spaces where once
rang laughter, crying, singing,
even when the cake stays exactly
where she left it in the fridge,
when her car doesn’t leave the drive
for days because no one needs
to be taken to school or to dance.
Even then, she’s a mother,
when the phone doesn’t ring,
when her child can no longer
walk in the room, can’t say hello,
can’t even breathe, even then,
even then when there is no damn way
she can care for her child, that sad
fact does not change the fact
that she’s a mother, just as a tree
in the field is no less tree when the saplings
that came from its seeds are cut down,
just as a happy memory might still
make you happy even if it arrives
amongst tears. She is no less a mother
when the only thing that fills her arms
is tenderness for other mothers with
empty arms, when instead of holding
anyone, she lets herself be held.
Still
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged grief, stuffed animal, toy on May 6, 2026| 4 Comments »
Over four years after his death,
I still sleep with Skinny Puppy, the lovey
my boy treasured and slept with each night,
even into high school. Flat with no stuffing,
a soft square body with a small round head.
Every night in the dark, I tuck its worn,
brown fabric beneath my left arm,
let it nestle up against my heart.
Every morning, it’s still there.
I make it into the bed. I feel no shame
in wanting its slight weight against me.
Such simple comfort.
Not that I need an object for him to be with me.
I carry him inside. Close as breath.
But four years after his death, I like
the reminder he was here. I like
to remember how he loved soft things.
How he was capable of such tenderness
in the ways he held the world,
this world that could not manage to hold him.
At the Center of the Garden
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged apple, garden, grief, growth, orchard, tree, wound on May 2, 2026| Leave a Comment »
When no one
is looking
she touches
the wound
that hides
beneath
her smile
where the scion
of acceptance
was grafted
to her rootstock
of stubbornness.
Most people
don’t notice
the scar,
focused as they are
on the fruit,
but she
remembers
the cut,
the tissue exposed.
How tenderly
she traces
that place
where the union
was formed.
Since the wounding,
her fruits
have become
vibrant, complex,
so sharp, even tart,
and so sweet.
After the Chickadee Hits the Window
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged boy, caring, chickadee, feeling, grief, love, pie on March 14, 2026| 6 Comments »
for Thilo
To the unmoving body
of the tiny bird in the grass
below the kitchen window,
the young boy brings a plate
of white safflower seeds.
Hours later, when the bird
has not moved, one wing still askew,
the boy weeps. His father and I
sing a death song as we carry
the almost weightless body
in a brief procession across the yard.
The boy and his mother walk
behind. Her fingers lightly rest
where his own wings would be.
There is a tenderness inside us
that knows every life is precious
and refuses to pretend otherwise.
Later, the boy carves a chickadee
into the top crust of an apple pie,
making of grief something beautiful.
I want to protect that part of him—
the part that feels, that respects,
that honors. I want to awaken
that part in us all—the part
that dares to care deeply,
the part that knows every
life matters.
Orbit
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged gravity, grief, holding, orbit on March 4, 2026| 6 Comments »
I thought I was holding grief.
Tonight I see grief is holding me.
Not with a vice grip. Not with a fist.
More the way gravity
holds the earth to the sun—
a force without which our planet
would lose all warmth, all life.
Love has many names. Grief is one,
and I am grateful tonight for the way
it tethers me not only to pain but
to beauty, goodness, connection.
Tonight I see grief not as a problem
to be solved but as an energy to explore,
to move with, to circle what is beloved.
There is some comfort even in knowing
it will never let me go. It is right that it
should hold me, even as I turn and turn.
Tender Astronomy
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged grief, Jack Ridl, kyra, star on February 20, 2026| 4 Comments »
with thanks to Jack Ridl
The day after she died,
Jack wrote to me.
Pick one star each night.
Name it Kyra.
Stare briefly toward it.
Say good, very good night.
His words became
a constellation,
a way to navigate the dark.
Sometimes, like now,
when I can’t see the stars,
I find one inside me.
Name it Kyra.
I say good, very good night.
Then I thank Jack.
For that moment,
everything is star.
After I Fell in the Canyon of Grief
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged acceptance, canyon, falling, grace, grief, surrender on January 7, 2026| 10 Comments »
we discover that falling in the canyon is our initiation
—Mark Nepo, “The Life After Tears”
I didn’t land. I fell and I fell and I fell.
At first as I plummeted, I feared the landing,
imagining an imminent crash. Then,
I fell through nights and middays. Fell through
kitchen floors and highways. Fell through
birthdays and Saturdays. Fell until the sense
of groundlessness was so familiar it no longer
felt like peril. I don’t know when I stopped falling.
There was no splat. No splash. No crushing of bones.
No sense of arrival. In fact, I am not certain
I am done with my falling. But I do know now
the falling is not something to be feared.
Not that we grow wings. This is not about flying.
It’s about falling. About meeting the gravity
and feeling its force and letting it carry me
in ways I have never before let myself be carried.
Now I know that the canyon of grief is
just another name for living the fullest life.
The reward for the falling is to no longer
expect a reward. The reward of falling is to
learn to not resist the falling. The reward of falling
is to feel how grace falls with us as if holding
our hand, like a teacher, like a friend.