I have to be honest.  It is a hard day to write.  I am sitting here looking for the words and the events of the last couple of days are interfering with my thoughts.  So, just like always, I am telling you what’s here, what wants to be written.  The chaos of our country feels like a robbery inside my mind.  When this letter started…

I know this last year felt like a rollercoaster that kept dropping you.  With no bottom. An indefinite drop.  Your head couldn’t catch up.  Your mind couldn’t process it.  And your heart kept trying to mend itself, inside a thousand breaks.  No mending possible. No chance at a breather.  Today the calendar says it's a New Year.  But you are still experiencing that same rollercoaster…

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live” my favorite author Joan Didion often reminds me. As I am putting words on paper for the final letter of 2020 I am thinking about the story I want to tell.  And what a better day to tell it, on December 25th.  It matches the non-traditional clothes of grief.  The rebellious acts of life after it.  We…

It is ok if some things that are meant to be easy, feel hard to do.  Don’t compare yourself to others.   If something feels hard, it is hard.  Someone else’s experience with it, can’t change yours.  This goes for everything.  Including grief.  Including Christmas.  The Holiday Season makes some people happy and others sad.  Hearing Christmas Carols can make one man weep and another cheer. …

I don’t know how it comes back, but it does.  It comes knocking on your door.  Even though you can barely notice it at first.  I am talking about the feeling of wanting to live again.  I know you never thought it would come back.  You didn’t believe it could find you.  But it did.  It found you crying in front of the TV.  And…

I have been more emotional lately.  I know you have too.  There is something in the air. Isn’t there?  Something ungraspable.  Unknowable.  Quite unspoken.  Even though we do speak of it.  I see it in people’s eyes.  Heaviness sitting inside emptiness. How do we even begin to understand it?   A burden like no other.  It is as if it wasn’t part of the pain education…