Today is a day we honour fathers in our lives…”Father’s Day”…and folks all over the city are having brunches, breakfasts of dried out cold toast or limp waffles, and BarBQ’s. The value of fathers in a child’s life cannot be overestimated. Having a father to affirm your personhood, to celebrate who you are, to remind …
Walking with the Pain of Infertility
This week is National Infertility Awareness Week in Canada. Infertility is a special sort of pain… …and it’s often minimized and misunderstood. When a parent has a child who dies, there is a funeral, and public mourning, and a collective grief that surrounds the family. We know as a community that the death of a …
Does Social Media comfort or numb grief?
I spent some time on Laurie Kilmartin’s twitter account today (twitter handle: anylaurie16), which became very popular as she live tweeted her experience of her father’s last days in early March this year. Now…to be clear, she’s a professional joke writer (for Conan) and a comedienne in her own right, and so her tweets about …
So low that down is up
I don’t remember where I heard this line, but I heard it a very loooong time ago, and it stuck with me. I’m thinking of it particularly today, being December 21st, the shortest day of the year. I am a sunshine lover, and crave the brightness and the warmth that the sun brings…so the fall …
Hump Day Nudge: Honoring a Memory with Lavish Joy
Aaron Collins was a guy who had a quirky sense of humour and fun. He’s dead now…died last summer. He was all about experiences, not possessions, and so when he died, he asked that any money he had would be shared freely with folks who could be impacted by it. His family went for pizza …
Carved different now
Twenty years ago yesterday, I went to sleep in my hospital bed with the comforting memory of the strong heartbeats heard earlier in the evening ringing in my ears. Twenty years ago today, I woke up to nurses not being able to find the heartbeats. Twenty years ago today is the day of birth of …
Gardens of Memories
I took a Junior Tribe Member out for lunch today…as I have done on their birthdays from the time they were in preschool. We go to the restaurant of their choice…many years it was at McDonald’s or Dairy Queen, then later, out for pizza, and lately the choice has been Cora’s. Lunchtime at school is …
Minding Dad
My history with Misericordia Health Centre is a long one…going back to before I was born. My mother went to nursing school there. She graduated from the nursing school and went on to work decades at the Misericordia Hospital. I remember going there once as a little girl when she went late at night for …
Pain
Do we know how to sit in pain, discomfort, uncertainty and confusion? Uh…that’s a hard one. Do we want to know? Nope…that’s an easy one. No. Do we have a choice? Sigh…that’s an easy one too. No choice, nope. There was a time in my life years ago, when I was in a dark place…my …
L’il Espy
A big snowfall may be coming on outside…the driving is gonna be rough, our world will be white until spring, it’s gonna be tricky to get around for months…but Espy reminds us that there is hope. There is life. There is goodness. There is beauty… …even in the midst of a cold dark season…but we …