Toni Lepeska
When a Parent Dies
Give yourself credit. Even if you aren’t doing grief like your mother, best friend or neighbor. Even if you haven’t been out of bed in a week. Even if you still collapse in tears recalling how you missed your father’s last Christmas.
Thanksgiving is the time of year that we taste our grief. Literally. I mean, no one makes homemade cornbread dressing like Mom. But … she isn’t here anymore to make it. It cannot be the same … So, like any perfectly sentimental daughter, I always make dressing like Mom made dressing. I use her recipe. …
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 …
By Toni Lepeska The coronavirus pandemic has elicited a new catch phrase – “stay safe.” I hear it on the telephone with doctor’s offices and in text messages from friends. It has replaced “take care,” “see you later,” and “be careful.” How essential is safety? Where can we find it when our world has been …
Grief forces us to start over. It forces a huge start over. And then there are the smaller start overs in life. That’s where I am today. It’s scary. It’s uncertain. Starting over also is full of possibilities. Full of new opportunities. Full of growth. I invite you to come with me. For the past …
Are you in the winter of the soul, a season of darkness and barrenness? Maybe you wonder if there could ever be a spring again. January is cold, even here in the South. The trees are bare. The ground is hard. The grass is pale. Life is asleep. Sometimes my inner life looks like the …
Are you an adult orphan? I’d never heard of the term until I became one – and felt like one. I read it in a book somewhere. I then realized others had felt the same way as me. I identified with the term though my mother was still living. Why? Because with my father’s death, …
Change. It’s the time of year we embrace it. Change our weight. Change our attitude. Change our career path. We make resolutions, determined to be different in the New Year – to change. Other changes we fiercely resist. Familiarity is a comfortable companion. While routine rules, different drools. We like status quo. But change, as …
A dozen thoughts whirl around my head about my parents and my care-giving days as I navigate a new, temporary reality – being the one to receive care. This reality is opening up an old chapter on my life that was filled with stress and grief. A chapter that I thought was behind me, fully …
