Lives Well Lived — a New Publication
Our submission process
Introducing LWL
I was in my early fifties the first time I went to the Vancouver Folk Festival. I felt as if I’d come home.
It was three months after my spouse died; I’d been going to see and hear music on weekends and week nights, too. It had become my healing agent.
Grief is grief. Miserable. Sad. Make you want to crawl out of your skin stuff.
Mourning is the ritual part of grief, the public face we put to it, what we do to acknowledge.
Grief is the be of loss, and mourning is the do. Our responses.
Writing tribute — obituary — to honour, to remember, to story, is part of mourning.
Of course there’s the oddity of feeling keenly the passing of public figures. Davie Bowie died exactly three months before my spouse, and his other hero, Prince, eleven days after. My spouse was a guitar player and teacher, and somehow the passing of those two through those last weeks of his ALS added to my later hunger for live music.
In spite of their “public figure” status, and not knowing Prince or Bowie, I did feel a sense of community grief, woven with my deeply personal grief.
