Toni Lepeska
When a Parent Dies
I passed the Barnes & Noble self-help section that featured books on capturing every sort of success. Get rich. Get peace. Get healthy. In five easy steps. Goals! The red ink screamed, catching my eye. The subtitled promised, How to Get Everything You Want – Faster Than You Ever Thought Possible. I wasn’t going to …
My heart goes out to those who are losing people during this pandemic, enduring the absence of final goodbyes at hospitals and the rituals of friends at funerals. We need mourning rituals. They help us feel love. They help us cope. They help us manage the array of emotions that rain down on us like …
The drama unfolded at Memphis International Airport inside the compact Honda Civic I’d owned for seven years. I shut the door, and with the windows rolled up against the July heat, I opened my mouth and screamed. I screamed as loud as I had ever screamed. The man I loved, the one waiting for a …
Did you ever imagine monsters were under your bed or in your closet? What did you do as you huddled under the covers? You called out to your parents, right? Did they speak softly to your fears? And did you hope they’d stay in the room all night? You were sure to be safe with …
The year 2020 will probably go down in history as a bad one. We all know why. The pandemic. Shelter-in-place orders. Isolation. Deaths of people we know and love from COVID-19. We’re just past the mid-point of this awfully difficult year, but we don’t have to surrender the next six months to the trash can …
What happens when we don’t feel safe anymore? When uncertainty rules the day? When life is turned upside down? The pandemic qualifies as a world-changing event in terms of individuals, families and nations, but even a virus cannot hold a candle to my personal world-turned-upside-down event.
Expressing our grief through storytelling deepens our understanding of grief. And that deepens our potential to heal. I’ll be part of a podcast this coming Saturday, the day before Father’s Day, to encourage anyone, experienced writers or beginners, to utilize this important tool within their grief journey. The authors you’ll hear will be reading their …
Are you going through a storm? Do you feel battered by the modern world’s equivalent of swirling winds and pounding rain in a sea of uncertainty? I remember the day my dad died. He was there, and then he was gone, and there was nothing I could do to bring him back. The storm of …
The question goes through our minds in a dozen different ways and sounds like this: “When will I feel better?” We expect to grieve during the funeral and for weeks after the funeral, but then a month passes. Six months. A year. Five years. We want our living hell of loss to be over. Or …
