Category Archives: loss

time runs out.

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“It is easy to mourn the lives we aren’t living. Easy to wish we’d developed other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we’d worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga.

It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn’t make and the work we didn’t do the people we didn’t do and the people we didn’t marry and the children we didn’t have. It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out.

But it is not lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It’s the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people’s worst enemy.

We can’t tell if any of those other versions would have been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on.”

in memoriam of r.s. – you will be greatly missed and thanks for the music

credits:

text: Matt Haig – The Midnight Library, 2020.

art: Grant Haffner – Into the night, 1978

two hearts.

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yesterday

my sister let us know 

 she lost her husband

of so many years

on christmas day

in this

the same year

he lost his father

before too long

we’ll fly to her

to be together

for a remembrance and celebration of his life.

“sympathy is two hearts tugging at one load.”

-charles henry parkhurst

the art of living.

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 the littlest yeti

the bravest warrior

the sweetest brother to olive

 lived with a disease he valiantly fought

 made it to his first birthday

 filled with crazy fun and sass

left the earth as suddenly as he appeared

as yetis sometimes do. 

“all the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on.”

~ havelock ellis

our last day.

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we spent our last day together

glenn frey the cat, not the rocker

olive the cat, not the oil

and me.

glenn has taken a turn for the worse

and is quickly slowing down

resting in his favorite place

with olive refusing to leave his side

the three of us

sit in the quiet

just breathing

looking out at the signs

of the seasons changing

taking in the breezes.

i think back to his multiple rescues

his funny, crazy ways

his very loud voice

how i often spelled his name wrong

how he acted tough at first

but was really such a gentle giant

how he tried to camouflage himself in the vines and flowers

how he welcomed another rescue, tiny olive

into our little family.

in the morning

there will be

just two of us left

when we return to this room

as we say farewell

to our sweet friend, glenn frey.

even the flowers are sad.