Toni Lepeska
When a Parent Dies
Do you dream about your parents? Do your loved ones seem alive again in your sleep? I love dreaming about my parents, but often dreams are uncomfortably instructive rather than happy. Such was the case in 2015. That spring, I was focused on devising a way to articulate for my first book what the cleaning …
I didn’t like my name. School teachers and classmates misspelled and mispronounced it. Others expected me to be a boy, to be Tony. Not Toni. But I’ve long since gotten over that, and even love my name now. I’ve never met nor discovered through Google another Toni Lepeska. It’s unique. Maybe you’ve struggled with your …
I’ve got a special relationship with stuff, but a professional organizer who visited our church this week challenged my attachment, not only to my belongings but to things I inherited from my parents. Kathy Armstrong lets go of things. I latch onto them with unmatched ferocity. I didn’t recognize the extent of my attachment until …
Writing is a pretty isolating endeavor, but I’ve learned that while I sit in in front of a computer all by myself, I do not write alone. And so I want to thank you, my readers. In the past two weeks, the number of followers to this blog has doubled. Others are readers but are …
My first Valentine was my daddy. If you had a good father, you know the tremendous stabilizing influence they provide. While other valentines came and went, my daddy remained. Do we mourn mothers more than fathers? Perhaps it seems so. An emotional umbilical cord links us to them. And yet, when we lose a father, …
I struggled receiving comfort in the idea that my mother was in heaven, even though I believed in the afterlife. And while I am delighted she isn’t suffering anymore, the whole thing for me was she was gone from my side. I believed she gained so much. But I had lost so much. Seven years …
We find ourselves pulled toward others who have lost loved ones like us. We want to help, to listen or to offer guidance. We may even decide to share our experiences in a larger forum. We blog. We write articles. We speak to groups, but we may not reach the numbers we hope for. And …
If you’re wondering what to do with eyeglasses your loved one left behind, I’ve got an option for you. I found a home for my parents’ eyewear, but first I had to tackle the hesitancy of letting go. I’d been collecting the pairs of prescription eyeglasses for years as I found them scattered about my …
Her articles were never accepted for publication, but if she’d never written them, I would have lost the stories. I would have lost a piece of her.
