Tag Archives: heritage

One of those weekends…

The Writing Life of a Tadpole Posted on by  

Just under a year ago, I posted a message about feeling loss around the time of Easter (An emotionally difficult weekend). Basically, it’s a holiday that for me has always been associated with my mom. Not that she was a giant “Easter” person with egg hunts and stuff, maybe just because it is at heart a religious holiday and my mother symbolized my Catholic heritage. Since her passing, I’ve struggled with grief in varying forms.

For the first year, most of the time was taken up with logistics of her estate and the grief was kept at bay, at least in part. Then, as time passed after closing the estate, I noticed that I was run down. My normal psychological tools weren’t working either. Normally, if something is bothering me, I have three tools available to me.

First, self-reflection. If I think about things, try to quiet my mind, and simply reflect on the times when things are bothering me and what some of the triggers might be, I can often figure out pretty well who, what and sometimes why.  » Read the rest

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Building my memory bank

The Writing Life of a Tadpole Posted on by 3

Just after the Easter weekend, I posted an update about my tough weekend (An emotionally difficult weekend). Mostly what I described was how I felt disconnected from my roots since my mother died, and that I felt a bit lost. Lots of my friends chimed in, some with support, some with their own stories of loss, isolation, disconnection, even potentially feeling like an orphan despite being an adult. Some suggested ways to reconnect with the community or my own new family, although disconnection probably wasn’t quite the right sentiment that I was trying to describe. It isn’t like I feel isolated, no family, no friends, but rather more like an inexperienced sailor who has sailed out into the ocean but who now notices that he can no longer see the land that originally oriented him to his point of origin. So, lots of reactions, lots of support, and I appreciate all of it.  » Read the rest

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An emotionally difficult weekend

The Writing Life of a Tadpole Posted on by 3

For those who know me in real life and not just online, you know that my mother passed away just over 2 years ago from ring-cell cancer that had spread through-out her body. It was a frustrating experience for everyone — a failing body with no obvious cause, with the final diagnosis only coming with the post-mortem examination (i.e. an autopsy). But, on the positive side (to the extent that there is ever a positive side to losing a parent), it wasn’t “sudden” with no opportunity to say goodbye.

My father had passed away 17 years before, so that basically leaves the six surviving kids, of which I am the youngest. For some people, the loss of a parent can be a bonding experience, showing what the kids are made of as they pull together. In our case, it really showed that of the six kids, two see the world in a radically different way than the other four.  » Read the rest

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