Toni Lepeska
When a Parent Dies
What do you hold onto that makes you feel close to your deceased loved one? Is it a shirt with their smell? A love letter? Or maybe it’s not an object but a shared cause or creed you foster. Connection. We all seek it but in different ways. I believe it is a critical component …
I will never see Halloween the same. I loved it as a child, but once you come face to face with real death, images of ghosts, ghouls and skeletons aren’t playthings anymore. I’m not trying to rain on the Halloween parade. Really. And I’m not such a stiff that I don’t participate. A few years …
My mother prepared me for the onslaughts of lustful and malevolent men. I was a girl, encased in loving cocoon, listening to how they had hit her. Tried to rape her. Tried to kill her. She left her first abusive husband only to be abused by the second. He then poisoned her with arsenic. Later, …
Daddy died, and I thought the universe owed me a break. My mother was terminally ill. And I had a chronic illness. I deserved a pass on all other trouble – or so I believed. And thus, understandably, I blew my top six months later when the guy I adored walked all over me and …
I walked from the night into the veterinarian’s office with blood smeared on my arms, caked on my T-shirt and dried into the crevices of my toenails. I’d nursed a lot of animals before, but I’d never seen so much blood. At the sight of my baby’s wet, dripping, red paws, I had initially thought …
I helped my 10-year-old friend clean and organize her room. As she lobbied to keep a shoe that was about to fall apart, I saw shades of myself in her. And a characteristic of my mother. Her name, which I’m withholding, means moonlight. So I’ll call her Moonlight. An artist, Moonlight saw value in things …
I bet you inherited books. Maybe a Bible. Or a series of recipe books. Or maybe like me, you inherited enough books to fill a small library, too many to ever read during your busy life. What are you to do with them all? I suggest you examine them closely before deciding to haul them …
What am I supposed to be? At different times in our lives we may ask this question or versions of it. Our sense of purpose – what am I to be? – is wrapped up in our identity – who am I? Nothing shakes identity’s foundation more violently than death. We were spouses, but now …
Death strips us all possessions. So it isn’t surprising that, yes, my parents left behind all their keys – a mass of keys that I combed through on the anniversary of Dad’s passing last week. Door keys. Car keys. Keys to the post office box I still rent. Keys to who knows what. They didn’t …
