Not long ago, I had one of those days. They come along periodically, and randomly, it seems. I wake up with a nagging sensation of trouble. Initially I wonder if I’ve neglected to take care of something important for work, or if I have to pay a bill, or sign a child up for something before deadline, or make an appointment for a medical test, or what.
Every time this happens, it takes pretty much all day to unearth the cause. I don’t know why. You would think I could figure it out quickly by now. Then again, when I…
My brother died on a highway. I have often thought about traveling to the location where he spent his last moment alive. I am unsure whether I will actually do it. I don’t know when I would go, what I would do there, and what the experience would mean to me.
What I do know is that I have a choice. I can choose to go, or not to go, depending on what I decide serves me best.
Places are one of several types of grief triggers I’ve experienced. Sometimes, you can opt to avoid a difficult place. In my…
Fact: I do not manage my inbox effectively. When I receive an urgent e-mail, something related to work or my children or a health issue, I handle it as soon as I can. Any other message I cannot address right away I keep in the inbox, thinking that its presence will remind me to respond later on.
However, I receive so many e-mails a day that whatever I don’t handle drops out of my range of vision within a few hours, creating an “out of sight, out of mind” problem. Over time the un-handled e-mails build up.
Add to this…
When you are diagnosed with cancer and go into treatment, people often find you courageous. It happens all over, with every type of cancer. In fact, a Google search for cancer and courage generates over 28 million hits.
I struggled with the cancer-courage link when making my way through diagnosis, surgery, chemo, and radiation — because I didn’t feel courageous. Yes, I did whatever I could to stay alive. When you know you have cancer and you want to keep living, you choose a course of action and follow it. …
As I’m writing this, after reading a New York Times article about how human error and risky behavior cause 93 percent of car crashes in the U.S., I’m angry. Yesterday, looking at my brother’s Facebook page, I was in denial. Two weeks ago, slogging through unseasonably cold weather and bracing myself for the second anniversary of the death of my only sibling, I was depressed. I have wondered: Shouldn’t my experience match up with the famous “stages of grief”? Am I grieving in the wrong way?
No, I’m not getting grief wrong — and if it were possible to ask…
April 24, 2016
So. Four months have passed, and four friends are gone.
January — lymphoma.
February — brain cancer.
March — metastatic kidney cancer.
April — metastatic breast cancer.
Some local residents, some not. One man, three women. Three adults (all too young) and one teenager (far, far too young). All with loving connections with family and friends near and far. All spending their lives making the world a better place, day in, day out — until cancer brought the count of those earthbound days to a final stop.
It’s hard to avoid asking questions like “Why?” and “How…
I cannot reach all of the people in my contacts on my phone and computer. They are not all available. And I don’t mean that some of them are crazy busy. I mean that some of them are dead.
I don’t believe I’ve ever talked to people about how they handle their contacts when a friend or family member dies. I don’t know what other people do, but how I handle it is that I don’t handle it. I do nothing. I keep them in there.
For me there’s something too final about deleting people out of my contacts when…
I have always been rather a grammar nerd. I was an English major and am now a writer. I use the serial comma proudly and cringe at the misuse of the apostrophe. But my brother’s death opened up a whole new channel in my brain that is focused on verb tense, every day, all day.
I have a brother. I have a brother? I had a brother? He is a brilliant person. He was a brilliant person? He is here — he was here — which is it? Would that he were here.
With every thought of him, with every…
Recently I went on a business trip and picked up a copy of Cheryl Strayed’s Wild in an airport bookstore. Since my brother was killed by a drunk driver not quite two years ago, several people had recommended it to me, and my long flight home was the perfect time to take it in.
I read the book from cover to cover. I found it engaging and the journey was impressive. I was looking to be inspired, as I could use every bit of inspiration I can get these days.
I did feel inspired, to some extent. Even more than…
March 4, 2016
A while ago, a friend passed along a link to an article on the Huffington Post called “When a Brother Dies,” by Judith Newton.
Ms. Newton says: “Even siblings we don’t see, who live differently from us, who move in their own world, may be shoring up our lives, our sense of family, our feeling of being at home in the world without our knowing it.”
Although my brother and I had a closer relationship than what she describes of her relationship with her brother, much of that quote rings true to me because of the nearly…
Sarah Lyman Kravits
Pondering how to cope with grief, cancer, and crisis by setting aside judgment. Blogging at www.lifewithoutjudgment.com. Parenting, partnering, teaching, being.
