Photo taken at the Sacred Garden, Maui My heart and mind are with Hawai'i right now and so I am recycling this blog that came from my time there. This is a perspective I have been coming back to as I enter week six of my healing process. “Trust Faster.” This little phrase caught my eye while I was standing in the greenhouse shop at the Sacred Garden on Maui. It was etched on a small branch—simple and elegant. I took it in, then continued shopping. But 'Trust Faster' had lande

Artist: Diane Marsh, "Sanctuary" What do you call parents who can no longer parent? I stop myself from saying parents who no longer have children. Death does not alter that fact… The verb that does not die is to be. ~ Yiyun Li I awakened from a sweet and tender dream. There were three oh, so very handsome young men, searching for the love of a mother. I did not have to understand their individual stories. They allowed me the supreme pleasure if only in my dreamworld, to tap

2026 is ushering in a move for my husband, our dog, Trinie, and me. We are on the road again, and how these kinds of things come in is truly a mind meld. I didn’t see this one coming, yet when it did, the genie could not be stuffed back into the bottle. The relocation that was the most tender and emotional for me was leaving our Utah home twelve years ago where we had raised our children. I vividly recall in the wee hours of the morning as our dear friend, Alan, drove us to t

Artist: Britnie Watson A woman in the audience of an event that Glennon Doyle’s podcast, We Can Do Hard Things was hosting requested some parenting advice. Perhaps might there be something Glennon would do differently now given her lived experience? Abby, Glennon’s wife offered a warning reminding her that their children were in the audience. Laughter ensued as Glennon reassured her that they already knew what she was going to share. Glennon went onto explain that she freq

Douglas is on the bottom row, second to the left. I don’t want an endpoint to my sorrow. The death of a child is not a heatwave or a snowstorm, nor an obstacle race to rush through and win, nor an acute or chronic illness to recover from. Thinking about my children is like air, like time. Thinking about them will only end when I reach the end of my life. ~ Yiyun Li I will always recall my mom telling me that I would think of my son, Douglas, all the time. What changes and ca

Lisa, contemplating and communing with her best friend, her mother. The Cost of Loving Me By Lisa Tannert “If you die, I’ll drink again.” It was just a thought, and not even true, but I knew the power those words held. I sat beside my mother’s hospital bed. She was unrecognizable after a brutal year—she had endured heavy doses of chemo and an autologous bone marrow transplant meant to prevent her T-cell lymphoma from returning. She was cancer-free, but the chemo had irreparab