thanksgiving and my 200th post

This morning I'm sitting in my office, waiting for things to pick up, while still trying to recover from last night's ninety minute commute home from hell and simultaneously gearing up for an even worse one tonight. This is Thanksgiving traffic in Los Angeles. It is soul-crushing. Last night I cried in my car but this morning I was laughing about how people lose their damn minds while staring at the snaking line of brake lights through their windsheilds.


I've been thinking about how different things are this year as opposed to this time last year. Last year the holidays left me a quivering mass of jello made from a Brianna mold. Lemon-flavored jello. Bitter and transparent. Which, of course, was a completely reasonable state to be in. This time last year I wrote the following post. I read it now and feel so acutely what a difficult time I was having when I first wrote it.


But things are different this time. Better. Happier. The intensity of my grief over George's death is not debilitating as it was a year ago. Anyway, the purpose of this post was to give encouragement to those of you are facing down your first holidays without your babies. It gets better. The pain never goes away but it does get easier, I promise you.


Wishing you all a peaceful day tomorrow.




Stretched and Stark (originally posted November 9, 2010)



On days like this it comes so near as to snatch the breath from my lungs.  I reach out and feel the bitterness and anger and sorrow on the tips of my fingers.  Smooth, solid.  An obelisk of obsidian throwing long shadows on my life's landscape.



A seed of wide love coated a thousand times over in mourning.  My very own black pearl. 


My mind wanders to naked branches, limbs stretched and stark against a blue sky.  They herald the coming season but instead of choirs of angels I hear them speak to me in cautionary baritones.  The Winter creeps ever closer still and one morning I awake to find that it is almost upon us.  The nearly imperceptible change of the angle of light throughout the day; soft and simultaneously inexorable.  I feel the weight of it pressing on to my shoulders.


There is no shine or sparkle to these days ahead.


I once read a book* and it pulled loose a small thread in one of my seams.    


“Nothing is predetermined, it is determined, or was determined, or will be determined. No matter, it all happened at once, in less than an instant, and time was invented because we cannot comprehend in one glance the enormous and detailed canvas that we have been given – so we track it, in linear fashion piece by piece. Time however can be easily overcome; not by chasing the light, but by standing back far enough to see it all at once. The universe is still and complete. Everything that ever was is; everything that ever will be is – and so on, in all possible combinations. Though in perceiving it we imagine that it is in motion, and unfinished, it is quite finished and quite astonishingly beautiful. In the end, or rather, as things really are, any event, no matter how small, is intimately and sensibly tied to all others. All rivers run full to the sea; those who are apart are brought together; the lost ones are redeemed; the dead come back to life; the perfectly blue days that have begun and ended in golden dimness continue, immobile and accessible; and, when all is perceived in such a way as to obviate time, justice becomes apparent not as something that will be, but something that is.”


I've since unraveled as time has pulled me away farther from him.


Underneath something different.  Nearly imperceptibly so.  Softer and simultaneously inexorable.  


How I ache to believe that we will be brought together.  That he is more than just a single brush stroke on this canvas.  That he is, no matter how small, intimately and sensibly tied to all others.


My son, where are you?

I miss you.

I am incomplete.