Toni Lepeska
When a Parent Dies
I’m accustomed to feeling all sorts of colliding emotions with grief – anger, depression and even regret, but shame was a new one on me. I didn’t even know what to call it when I experienced it. Do you ever feel shame within the context of your loss? My dictionary defines shame as “a painful …
I don’t want to tell you that I’m grieving again. Not that I ever really stopped, but after eight years without my Mom, it wasn’t intruding into my every hour or day in that heartbreaking way. But lately, it has – in that heartbreaking way. In that way that hinders sleep. In that way that …
I should have known better. I’ve been grieving long enough to know. But because I didn’t think ahead, I planned the last grand sale of my parents’ belongings right before Father’s Day. And right before “death month” – July. Both my parents died in the month of July, three years apart. Every year I march …
I thought I’d never reach the so-called “acceptance” stage of grief, and I didn’t want to. How dare anyone think I’d consent to my parents being ripped from my life? And yet I find myself in a strange place. After a multi-year strangle-hold on my parents’ belongings – which helped me feel close to them …
We flushed the toilet using pond water and we took turns in a vigil by the gas stove, our only source of heat. In this way, we survived a power outage one winter during my childhood. I didn’t imagine my parents were teaching me how to weather a crisis, a physical one. Many years later, …
I squealed and talked into the camera. A selfie video. I was going to take the calculated risk of being drowned in an endless ocean to do what my father had done. To follow his footsteps. Are you afraid? I am sometimes. I was afraid after my father died. I was afraid of a life …
How do we survive grief? A major component is embracing new things. New routines. New relationships. But we stubbornly resist. We want things the way they’ve always been. Must we discard the old to make way for the new? Sometimes perhaps, but not always. Healing is at its best in the memories that contain both …
I received a message from my parents on their phone the other day. Dad has been dead for more than a decade, and the eighth anniversary of Mom’s death is in July. But I got a message. I’m not talking about a message from beyond. I do not believe we should seek to communicate with …
Where do daddies keep their daughter’s handmade birthday cards? Or brochures of sports games they attended together at her college? May I suggest they keep them in their filing cabinets. That’s where I found the ones my father kept. He stashed old utility receipts there, too, and appliance manuals and sermon notes and photo copies …
