Toni Lepeska
When a Parent Dies
Maybe that’s the question you are asking today. “How can I go on?”
Despite the death of a parent or other loved one, there’s a mountain in front of us called life. How do we do it without him? How do we do it without her? Here are 4 first-steps to take, but first I want to tell you, I’ve been there.
Does Fall do to you what it does to me? Does it transport you to the past? Or maybe it inspires you to transform, to restyle your life like trees that tint their leaves. I wake, dress, grab my essentials and walk onto the carport. The breeze flutters through my hair. No more gummy sweat …
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 …
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 …
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 …
The loss of a loved one is difficult enough but what often follows are impossible questions, bitter anger and self-accusatory thoughts that nag us with what ifs and should-have-dones. What lifts us out of the quicksand of such a situation and puts us on the path of healing? What puts lingering questions to rest and …
I thought I needed to get around people. What I needed was to be alone. I’m a loner of sorts. A homebody. An introvert. I was raised by a woman who left the house only two or three times a year. When the stay-at-home orders came down amid COVID-19 fears, I thought “I’ve got this.” …
The coronavirus is messing with the ways we grieve and mourn. All over the news and all over the country, we’re hearing about social distancing – and funeral services aren’t excluded despite their cultural and emotional importance. In America, funeral directors are staggering events like visitations or wakes to minimize the number of people in …
How do we survive the longest night of the soul? To whom or what can we turn? What hope is there to latch onto when our lives feel battered, damaged beyond repair? I pondered the longest nights of my soul the morning of the literal longest night of the year, December 21st, in the Northern …
