Toni Lepeska
When a Parent Dies
I thought I’d never reach the so-called “acceptance” stage of grief, and I didn’t want to. How dare anyone think I’d consent to my parents being ripped from my life? And yet I find myself in a strange place. After a multi-year strangle-hold on my parents’ belongings – which helped me feel close to them …
We flushed the toilet using pond water and we took turns in a vigil by the gas stove, our only source of heat. In this way, we survived a power outage one winter during my childhood. I didn’t imagine my parents were teaching me how to weather a crisis, a physical one. Many years later, …
I squealed and talked into the camera. A selfie video. I was going to take the calculated risk of being drowned in an endless ocean to do what my father had done. To follow his footsteps. Are you afraid? I am sometimes. I was afraid after my father died. I was afraid of a life …
I want to share a poem with you that I heard again just before Mother’s Day. I first read it in 2011 at a memorial service for a teenager. She had died “out of order,” before her parents. Jessica was very much loved. Her family and friends crafted a garden at the church she attended …
I discovered the homemade Mother’s Day card inside a box of her things and read what I’d written at the bottom as a young teenager. “If I didn’t have you what could I do?” Indeed, I told myself, sitting in her house among her things, This is the question I’ve lived with since she died. …
How do we survive grief? A major component is embracing new things. New routines. New relationships. But we stubbornly resist. We want things the way they’ve always been. Must we discard the old to make way for the new? Sometimes perhaps, but not always. Healing is at its best in the memories that contain both …
I received a message from my parents on their phone the other day. Dad has been dead for more than a decade, and the eighth anniversary of Mom’s death is in July. But I got a message. I’m not talking about a message from beyond. I do not believe we should seek to communicate with …
Where do daddies keep their daughter’s handmade birthday cards? Or brochures of sports games they attended together at her college? May I suggest they keep them in their filing cabinets. That’s where I found the ones my father kept. He stashed old utility receipts there, too, and appliance manuals and sermon notes and photo copies …
The last day of his life, my father sat in the passenger seat of his van and struggled to control the muscles of his mouth. I listened carefully for words I’d recognize. He told me he was proud of me. I will forever cherish that last message, no matter how garbled it came out. Dad …
