Toni Lepeska
When a Parent Dies
With the sanctuary lights up and the pastor in the pulpit, they stand. They tower above me like a forest. A forest of women. I am small. An unimportant insect. Applause breaks out. It isn’t for me. It has never been for me. This is perhaps the most difficult moment of Mother’s Day. It is …
Who was your first Valentine? Maybe that cute boy with the cowlick who sat in the back of the classroom comes to mind. Or maybe you think of your daddy. I do. Our dads get us ready for all the Valentines that come afterward. If our dads treat us well, we look for a romantic …
We wear internal labels like name tags on our chest. Mother. Daughter. Wife. Winner. Loser. Lazy. Sick. Wealthy. Poor. Sinner. Saint. Do any of those labels sound familiar? They often come from external voices, from people we admire, or even people we don’t. But the loudest voice we hear is the one that comes from …
I found the lists after he died and wished I’d been more attentive to and thankful for who my father was. He’d put check marks beside the names and addresses on the list. They signified thank you notes he’d sent to each of the people who’d given him a gift. My father was a mail …
What does an unfinished life look like? One way is a half-empty container of Coke. That’s the first encounter I had with an unfinished life. My father had been dead only a few hours. I walked into the kitchen and there was the rest of his Coca-Cola in a sippy cup. It wasn’t the last …
I want to pause to thank all my readers for their support in 2017 and recognize that excitement over a new year might escape us as grievers, especially if our loss is fresh. The country stands at the precipice of 2018, glancing behind and gazing ahead, but as grievers we likely have been doing that …
I am not a hoarder. I am attached to stuff, but I am not a hoarder. Now before you say “the lady doth protest too much,” I must explain. Before I asked whether I was a hoarder, I asked whether my parents were hoarders. I inherited all their stuff. A lot of stuff. Charged with …
Each Christmas is the first Christmas for someone – the first Christmas without mom or dad. Or without a husband or wife or child. Or without a grandparent or uncle or best friend. All the carols, all the joy, all the tinsel. It feels like a dagger to the chest. The loss of who isn’t …
I stood frozen in the doorway of my parents’ walk-in closet again, my eyes darting from Mom’s red party dress to Dad’s sports jackets. Cleaning out a loved one’s closet is perhaps one of the most daunting tasks. I put it off for eight years. Here’s what I learned.
