welcome

As members of existence, we’re bound together by the reality of change, illness, aging, and death. Through writing, I accompany myself and others in grief. Using my own reflections as well as snippets from others’ writing, songs, and art, I hope to connect readers with their own experiences of life and loss.

I write to explore pain, beauty, love, and meaning in my lived experience. Articulating the tender, the painful, and the poetic aspects of my life opens my heart and helps me reckon with the confines of reality. The reality that these traumas have happened. That loss is unchangeable, irreparable, and transformational. That I, we, will never be the same.

As well as the normal wear-and-tear of human blundering, life is punctuated by upheavals. Each person’s story is as intricate as the curvature of veins in their hands, and mine is as crossed and rippling as anyone’s. Being raised with my bizarre and beloved disabled brother, and my mother, whose depression rushed like a flexing undertow through all of my existence, I am familiar with the strange and the dark. Losing them both to suicide, in greatly different circumstances, shot me into shatters.

Now I am left with the shards of what was. Like broken glass found in sand, sometimes I pull up a buried fragment and am shocked by its sharpness. A cutting edge will sear me with pain just like the first days of grief. But these days, I’m finding sea glass. Colored bits of crystal that, when I lift a corner and shake off the sand, are smoother to handle. Memories that have been softened and chewed by the waves of time.

If you’d like to see them, I’d like to show you. I’d like to hand you bits of glass so you can press their warmth into your palm, hold them to the sunlight, and watch them glow. Perhaps you’ll find pieces of your own, see your life in mine. Some edges are still serrated. But together, we can be careful of hard margins. And maybe we can learn to hold all pieces, the soft and the severe, with gingerness and grace.