As many of you know from my posts last week, my stepfather Gary passed away, and I have been sharing and navigating that here on the blog. If you missed those posts, you can read A Life Well Lived and Liminality: The In-Between.
Grief does not keep a schedule. Your world stops, but the world around you continues. Your calendar is still filled with appointments, birthdays, anniversaries. Life. And so, today, I am jumping back into the blog with both feet.
That may seem strange to some, and I understand. But this blog is part of my life and part of my work, and I have obligations: to series I do with other bloggers, to readers who show up here every week, and to myself. Frankly, I could curl up in bed with three pups and do nothing, and there may be days that I do. But Gary would not have liked that. I know I do not have to explain. I thought I would anyway. Life is moving along, and I am putting one foot in front of the other.
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What I Read
A few weeks before Gary died, my husband gave me Nothing to Fear by Julie McFadden. Bill knew what was coming before the rest of us were quite ready to say it out loud. Julie McFadden is a hospice nurse who has spent her career sitting with people in their final days, and she writes about death with empathy and compassion. I recommend it to anyone walking alongside a loved one who is ill, or who simply wants to understand what dying actually looks like, because most of us have no idea.
This week I finished In the Light of the Sun by Angela Shupe. The story follows two sisters: Caramina, in the Philippines in 1941, who dreams of training in Italy to become an opera singer like her older sister Rosa, and Rosa herself in Florence on the eve of her long-awaited debut as Mussolini tightens his grip and she is drawn into the underground resistance. War tears their worlds apart. Music holds them together.
I was drawn in partly because of the sisters, partly because of the opera thread, and partly because I needed to go somewhere else for a little while. This book took me there.
What I Watched
“How to Manage Grief” from the Office Hours series on YouTube. I will link it below. The description alone stopped me: grief is part of the human experience. If you love, you will lose. And when you do, the pain is inescapable. It can be disorienting, overwhelming, and in the case of acute grief, the symptoms can even resemble something like psychosis.
That last sentence. I read it and thought: yes. The video is thoughtful, measured, and worth your hour. The aim, as the description puts it, is not to eliminate grief but to approach it with understanding.
Outfit of the Week
Outfit Details Below
I did not write a Weekend Meanderings post this past Saturday, but Juliet and Kim held down the fort beautifully. Please visit them and show them some love.
Thank you, as always, for being here. For the comments, the prayers, and the quiet kindness of showing up. It means more than I can say.
I would love to know: has a book or a film helped you through a hard season? What was it?
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