Attending a writing retreat was not something I planned on this year. My husband and I had taken a cruise to the Panama Canal during the first half of March, so my plans for travel throughout the rest of year were limited to visiting my children and grandchildren who live out of state, and perhaps, I might even be able to visit a dear lifelong friend who lives in Vermont.

Otherwise, I planned on staying home, working on my memoir, hoping to make some progress on it.

I also hoped to make progress on doing some Swedish death cleaning as my oldest daughter has been strongly urging me to do: “Mom, we don’t want to have to clean out all of your stuff after you are gone. Get rid of it!”

All of those plans went out the window when I just happened onto a post on ’s Memoir Monday offering midway through April. The words: Scroll down to the bottom for so many great workshops, stirred up my curiosity. I guess I’m always looking for great workshops when it comes to writing, even if I am not planning on going on a retreat, so scrolled to the bottom.

A retreat called: The Motherlode Retreat captured my attention, but these words are what drew me in to explore what this retreat was all about:

“Have you or someone you know found it challenging to write about your relationship with your mother?”

I wrote a bit about my mother in my last post, which my oldest daughter, always my best editor and a critic I deeply trust, described as boring. She was not wrong. I can’t seem to write about my life or my mother for reasons some of you whom also may have a complex and confusing relationship with your mother may understand.

I tend to write in an academic style. I also realize that I write memoir as a journalist would write. Let’s put it this way: I have a lot to learn when it comes to making my words come alive on the page.

That is one reason I wanted to go on this retreat. I needed the eyes and ears of other writers on my work. I needed to listen and learn from other writers. I was stuck when it came to my writing, and I needed Diana Friedman to hand me the key that would allow me to “explore how to unlock my matrilineal relationship” so I could more freely and honestly write my story in my own voice.

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The Setting

When I saw the photos of where the retreat was to be held, I knew this place checked all the boxes for what a perfect writing retreat spot would look like. What I did not know was how perfect Boyds Mill is for such a retreat and why. It is in an idlilic location near the Pocono Mountains in Pennsylvania. Little did I know how much the history of the place would play into making it the perfect place for writers to gather. The site is located at the home of the founders of Highlights Magazine. Everything is designed to serve the writers who meet there, whether it is as individuals or groups. And they serve three meals a day! The food is delicious and served with style and class by chefs who take great pride in making each meal a delight.

I’d forgotten how much joy fills my soul when I see fields of dandelions and wild violets in bloom until I got to Boyds Mill, nor did I know how much I missed walking all alone along a stream in the woods.

I’m a mountain girl at heart. My heart comes more fully alive when I am in the mountains, even if those mountains are nothing like the mountains of my home state of Colorado.

Being away from my urban life connected me to the earth again.

Memories long forgotten were awakened. I remembered young girl dreams and a childhood where we often spent time in the mountains where I took in the beauty of nature.

The Plan and The Purpose

I did not know Diana Friedman1 or anything about her when I first read about the retreat she was offering. But after I read these words,

What is the Motherlode? Is it the gift of love, creativity, compassion and strength we've received from our mothers that we carry through our lives? Or is the Motherlode more of a Motherload; a weight or sadness or dysfunction passed down to us through the motherline from our mothers who could not, for whatever reason, properly mother us?

I knew I had to attend the workshop she was offering. I talked to my husband about it and spoke of my long held writer’s dream of attending such a retreat. Then I headed to my computer, and with his full support, I quickly signed up for it, paid for it, and made plans to travel to it, even though attending meant I would have to travel by air halfway across the country.

At my age, I don’t make such plans lightly. Travel is hard once one reaches one’s 80’s, and I was not sure I could actually pull it all off without feeling depleted and overwhelmed.

I left a day early, thereby giving myself an additional time of rest in Scranton, PA. This was a good plan since I left my home at 3:00 a.m. the day before the retreat was to begin.

I arrived at Boyds Mill for the Motherlode Retreat refreshed and very excited.

I am happy to report the retreat did not deplete me. It inspired me. It woke me up to my love of learning. I met other gifted, and oh so smart and accomplished women. I began to see things in new ways when it comes to writing in general, and my writing in particular. I listened to others share their thoughts, their stories, and listened to them read their writing.

I felt seen, heard, valued. I learned while writing can lonely work, it is also work that needs the eyes and ears of others who are insightful, supportive and kind. I found a treasured community of writers.

Diana cracked the motherlode wide open. I began to see rich veins of silver in my story, some veins of which I may have thought of as coal before, and not as silver. She was able to do this as a teacher because she has done the work to heal from her own mother wound while also learning more about the subject and how to write about it.

Writing

One does go on a writing retreat to write. The stimulation of learning, discussing what we were learning often left me with so much nervous energy I had a hard time settling down during our writing time to write.

One afternoon, I took a walk along the stream trying to find focus and inspiration. When I came back to my room, I paced and pondered until I gave up or gave in to how tired I suddenly felt and took a nap. I set an alarm so I would be awake for the next session. Before the alarm went off, I woke up, picked up my notebook and began to write a poem.

 My mother, an artist,
taught me to see light and shadow.
To paint a landscape,
the artist must capture both,
my mother said.
I am not an artist,
but I see light and shadows,
and the way landscapes change 
when the light shifts
casting shadows where there were none
earlier in the day.

My mother taught me to see 
light and shadow
except at home.
At home,
I saw harm lurking in the shadows.
"There’s nothing there,"
she’d say.
I would have liked my own flashlight
so I could be sure.
I’d have liked to shine a light on those shadows,
but her denials 
of what I felt and sensed were
strong, 
insistent, 
dismissive.

I never had any interest in paint brushes.
I would have preferred a pen,
a pencil,
a typewriter,
a keyboard
to create stores about the landscape of my life,
one filled with both
 light and shadows.

At home,
I did not have a journal.
I did have notebooks.
I do not open my open my notebook.
I do not pick up a pen.
I see the light.
I see the shadows,
but
I do not use my pen 
to write about the landscape of my life
because I am 
afraid.

I know no one,
not even me,
 wants to see,
to admit, 
or to shed light on,
what I know is there
lurking in the shadows. 

Memoir writing is hard. It involves recalling memories that are hard, many of which have been long buried. Diana says memoir involves both voluntary and involuntary recall of memories. The poem came to me as an involuntary memory of how my mother would talk to me about how to paint a landscape when I was young and she spoke of developing a painter’s eye.

I was not an artist. I had none of her talent. I preferred reading, and dreaming of writing, but I was afraid to write as child, and as a young adult because I chose to keep my thoughts, my insights, my fears, my emotions, my feelings safe from those who would dismiss them or worse yet say what I was seeing or feeling was not true.

One of the phrases I heard over and over throughout my life from my mother was, “Sally, you don’t feel that way,” or the alternative which was, “Sally, don’t feel that way.” I wanted to say in return, “Well yes, actually I do feel that way,” but that was not allowed. Speaking about feelings might make someone feel bad, or it might cause division, or it might show me not to be a nice girl who kept my mouth shut. “Don’t go blabbing everything you see happening here to the whole world,” was the message I received loudly, clearly.

Afterward

I suppose that one must always go home after such life giving experiences. The key is to keep the momentum going when one get home. Before we left for home, we had the opportunity to reflect on the experience by thinking about and responding to some questions that Diana had for us. I wrote:

I learned:

• I need to get out of my writing practice rut that was getting me nowhere.

• I need to ask for help when I’m stuck - look for the helpers. Writing needs the eyes and ears of others.

• I learned I can still think outside of the box, see things in new ways and try new things.

I found the project I have long worked on, the memoir that is now just a bunch of words going nowhere has found new ideas about a new shape for the story. I think I have found a form for the story in which I can function.

Three steps I hope to take to keep going:

• Touch my project every day. Open Scrivener2 and use it without being intimidated by it. 3

• Establish outside accountability and maintain it with no excuses.

• Explore the idea I have for the structure of the work while remaining flexible within it. Be open to change in form, scope, and structure as I go along if change is needed.

Wish me luck.

XO

Sally

It was taken in August of 2019, just a little over six months before she died. In some ways, I am loath to show a photo of her in a her robe, her hair standing on end, and in such frail condition, and yet, when I look at the photo, despite her frailty and vulnerability, I see her strength and courage and dignity.

There she is at 103, having just gotten out of bed and walking into the living room with the aid of a walker. She is still standing. She has not succumbed to her bed.

This photo, along with all the others I have of her, tells part of her story. She lived to a very good old age, and so, her story in photos would not be complete without a few of her as she lived out her last days.

In this photo, you can see the walls of her home adorned with paintings. They are paintings she made. She was a gifted woman in so many ways. Her gifts as an artist and as a gardener were most evident in her home, a place she created for her husband, her children, and for herself. This place, her home, was a sanctuary for her until the end of her days. She was determined never to leave it.

Yes, she was stubborn, but in my mind, that stubborn “I can do this” spirit that I saw in her during my childhood and all through my life is one of other traits that facilitated her ability to live to such a good old age in her own way, mostly on her own terms.

How I admired so much about my mother. There was much to respect and admire.

She knew her place in the world, the one she had established and maintained. In doing so, she made sure she stayed in her long self-designated role and place she inhabited, and in many ways ruled over.

She also made sure in her subtle ways I knew my place. And stayed in it.

I don’t think she ever saw her role in my life as anything other than the prescriber of who I was to be and how I was to be in the world.

She had her place.

I had mine.

She made sure I knew that from my earliest days until she took her last breath.

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On this day when the photo above was taken, I had made the nearly seven hour drive from my home to her’s the day before. When I arrived at her home to see her the next morning, she was still sleeping. My sister had recently moved into her home to see to her needs, but until that time, my mother had lived on her own in her own home even as she had celebrated her one-hundredth birthday nearly four years before.

When I arrived at her home, my sister opened the door to let me in saying Mother was sleeping. I peeked into her bedroom to check on her. There she was, peacefully sleeping, the wisps of her white hair against her pillow and around her face. Her angel fine white hair framed her beautiful pink face.

She seemed a mix between an infant and a wise old woman.

Gazing on her beauty in the stillness of that moment, I saw a melding of both childlike faith and a deep ancient life wisdom resting in repose.I could do nothing but marvel at this version of beauty which was always on display throughout her life.

Though she was sleeping ever so peacefully, I gently told her I was there. She opened her eyes and smiled at me. I told her to go back to sleep and that I would be there when she woke up.

I should have known, she would not go back to sleep. She got up. She was not one to ignore her guests. She had wonderful hostess skills and had always made others feel welcome in her home. I snapped her photo as she walked into the living room.

My mother was a woman of great beauty.

She created many works of art that were beautiful by painting, and also by designing and growing beautiful flower gardens.

She had many gifts. Her beautiful soprano voice was one of them. As a child, whenever her voice was lifted up in church to sing a solo, I would gaze at her beauty in awe.

Even in her final years, as I would stand by her in church, hearing her soprano voice sing the beloved worship songs and hymns she loved, I would always get a lump in my throat and a tear in my eye. How I wish I had a recording of her singing.

My mother lived during a time and age when women had few options other than to be wives and mothers. She fulfilled that role faithfully, but I never believed she found much joy in being a mother. I wish she could have enjoyed her children and grandchildren, but she preferred to live apart from them.

I wish she would have found joy in being a mother.

I wish she have found joy in being my mother.

I think she found joy in aspects of being a mother when she was able to create clothes for us. I think she found joy in teaching me how to select fabrics, and patterns, and in teaching me to see style and create it. I think that part of being a mother gave her an outlet that she needed and had possibly looked forward to when she was a young woman.

I think she found joy in being a homemaker. She was always busy at that:creating slip covers and drapes and jewelry and her own clothes. This creative outlet gave her joy, and I think it was one way she escaped into being who she was.

I know she found joy in the garden, and that gave her a sense of release for all of her feelings, but she never expressed joy, nor did she show much joy in how she responded to her life.

She wasn’t dour. She could be quite funny, and fun, but I think a heartfelt, soulful joyful way of living escaped her. She often giggled with a young girl like giggle that I loved. I loved her giggle. She saw the humor in life. She enjoyed being around witty, intelligent, funny people, and could join in the fun, but I never say expressions of deep soulful joy.

She was not a mocker. I’m grateful she did not mock others, but she did allow mocking of others in our home to be part of the expression of how some responded to others in our family circle. She did not stand up to mocker, abusers, or those who took advantage of others, and that always made me deeply disappointed in her. She was not a champion of the underdog. She just looked the other way, and told me, “Sally, I just ignore them. You’d be better off if you did too.”

I believe she carried a lot of unexpressed sorrow and grief. She responded to loss and grief by just going on with life and not talking about it.

A few years before my mother died, she told me about the garden she grew when my father had gone to serve in World War II just as I was born. At that same time her father also died, leaving her an orphan with no siblings just as she beginning her days as a homemaker and mother. It must have been such a hard and terrible time for her.

This garden, the one she grew in 1945, literally sustained her as she grew her own food and raised chickens for the eggs and meat that she also ate. She said, “I would go out in the garden and really take out all of my feelings on it.”

All through her life, gardening brought her a measure of joy, perhaps because it was a place where she could work out her feelings as she dug in the dirt. Her gardens were places that gave her great pride. Her flower beds, food gardens, rose patches, were places where she could escape, feel productive, and bring beauty into her world.

I was three-quarters of a century old before I lost my mother. She died just days before the world shut down due to a pandemic in March of 2020. She just two months shy of turning 104.

She was a major figure in my life for many more years than most daughters are blessed to have their mothers. For that I am very grateful.

It is hard to lose a mother at any age. I found it especially difficult to lose my mother just two days after my seventy-fifth birthday.

My mother lost her mother when she was in her early twenties. Her mother never saw or held my mother’s children. Sadly, we never got to know her mother either. My mother seldom spoke of her. She said it was too hard to talk about.

Since my youth and until now, my mother has been the subject of so many of my writings, mostly private writings, as I have tried to capture her essence, her being. I’ve tried to understand her and my relationship with her and her relationship with others and the world around her.

Who was she as a person who was not a mother?

Who was she as a mother?

Who was she as my mother?

In my late sixties, seeking therapy had long been on my to-do list. “Before Mother dies, I must go to therapy to deal with my mother issues,” I’d tell myself.

Finally, a therapist is found. She listens to me tell why I am seeking therapy.

She listen to me as I tell her I don’t really know who I am or why I have chosen many of the responses to life that I have.

The therapist says,

I responded with,

As I thought of those choices I made, or behaviors I adopted to deal with my mother, I realized I must also consider how the choice my mother made for me without ever talking to me. Choices she made throughout my life without considering my thoughts on matter about her decisions for me.

She did not respect my voice on things that impacted my life. She never asked me about those decisions she made which impacted my future and my well-being in harmful ways.

I’ve been trying to write a memoir for years. I tell my therapist, “The problem is every time I start writing, trying to write my memoir, I keep writing about mother.” By now my mother has died, but I find I keep writing about her, or I keep not writing because of her.

The therapist asks,

This coming weekend, I will be traveling to the Pocono Mountain foothills in Pennsylvania to join other writers to attend The Motherlode Retreat: Mastering the Art of Writing About our Mothers, which will be facilitated by Diana Friendman. I am very excited about this upcoming time when I will join other writers as we explore writing, and writing about our mothers.

Wish me luck. I’ll try to take control of my own narrative without turning the pen over to my mother.

Thank you for reading and supporting my writing journey. Leave a ❤️ to let me know you stopped by.

IF THE WORLD FEELS LIKE TOO MUCH RIGHT NOW,

IT’S BECAUSE IT IS.

I doubt I am alone in being able to agree with those words. History is being made at a rate that keeps our heads spinning, and in today’s world, that swiftness of shifting political news takes place before our very eyes in real time thanks to those ‘smartphones’ we carry with us during all of our waking hours.

About My Absence from This Space

My loyal readers and subscribers deserve an apology from me. I have not sent out a newsletter for a much longer time than is excusable. I hope you will forgive me for my lack of communication.

Surprisingly, during that time while I was not posting on Substack or writing a newsletter, I have picked up nearly seventy new subscribers thanks to a note and photo which I posted in this space while my husband and I were on a cruise to the Panama Canal.

I’d like to take this time to welcome all of my new followers and subscribers! Also, thank you for subscribing! I hope to get to know you all better as time goes on.

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Now for the reason for my absence:

My husband and I were gone for two weeks on a vacation, and when we got home, we have been on a bit of a hamster wheel going to doctor appointments, catching up on things that needed to be done at home, and taking care of other pressing matters.

I had not wanted to go on this trip that we took. I told my friends and family that I was going kicking and screaming, but I was going. The days and weeks leading up to the trip were filled with a lot of tension between my husband and myself because of my reluctance to take the trip even as I struggled with my own the strong desire to set my own personal feelings aside so I could support my husband when he really wanted to make this trip, a trip of a lifetime. He’d always wanted to make to the Panama Canal, and when I agreed to book the trip, he reminded me we weren’t getting any younger.

I was open and honest about my hesitations and resistance, but also tried to express how I wanted to not go with him acting like I was a martyr who would make the time miserable for him. Thankfully, we worked through all those mixed and upsetting feelings before and during the trip.

Why I felt this way is hard to express, but I think fear was a big factor.

• I feared leaving the family at a time when health was precarious for loved ones. My son-in-law was awaiting a kidney transplant. (He received that transplant while we were gone on our trip, and he is doing amazingly well.)

• I didn’t want to spend the money for such a big trip when the financial times are so unstable and scary.

• I didn’t want to be away from home because: what if my kids (grown adults who are fully functioning and don’t really need me) needed me.

• I was afraid of going to the Caribbean Sea because of all the political instability in Central and South America thanks to our current president.

• I was stressed to the max from all that we as a family have gone through during the past few years, and I felt too stressed to go on a trip when I felt so much stress because I thought travel would only add to my stress.

• And, I don’t like cruises.

I Needed to Disconnect

I hope this photo above speaks volumes about how the time away went. Can you tell I was thrilled that we went on this very much needed vacation? Can you tell the time away not only agreed with us but also restored some much needed vitality and sense of fun and pleasure?

We had an absolutely fabulous time.

We took in many amazing sights, (and sites), ate delicious food, rested, read, I wrote, we slept, soaked up the sun, walked in beautiful blue sea waters, and dug our toes into the sand.

We also were rocked gently to sleep wrapped up in each others arms during a couple of rough stormy nights as sea, and during nights when there were no storms.

We disconnected from the world, our devices, our children, the problems at home, our not quite year old puppy, and did not have to go to any doctors’ appointments. We joked about how hard it had been to have a baby, aka our puppy named Winston, at our age. All those puppy training trials had taken a toll, (but it has been worth it)!

We just needed a break.

My dear husband and I reconnected with each other and remembered who we are as a couple and as individuals.

We gave each other space for time alone and yet also really enjoyed and celebrated being together as we always have through all these years. We laughed. I might have cried. We mused. We helped each other get through airports, and held hands as we walked new streets, saw new things, and stepped into the ocean.

We moved towards each other in new ways that happened because we listened more deeply to each other about what each of us are experiencing, fearing, loving, and hating about being in our eighties. We paced ourselves. We listened to good music. And, yes, we also spent too much money and did not give a damn.

Before we left, stress had kept me from listening to what I needed. I needed to de-stress by taking a break, but I was too stressed to know that.

Thankfully, I have a wise and wonderful husband who made it possible for me to relax, unwind, open-up, disconnect from those things stressing me out, reconnect with myself and him while he also got to enjoy getting away from all the stress of the world.

We’ve been home for nearly three weeks now. While life goes on filled with the same challenges, worries, and unsolved problems in an economy that is scary, we do not regret getting away, and will be so very grateful we were able to do so. We do feel a renewed sense of resilience and vitality to live into the world as it now is not how we wish it were.

Living in the In-Between and Liminal Spaces

I am writing this post on a day the Christian world calls Holy Saturday, the day in-between, that liminal space that occurred after Jesus was crucified by the Roman imperial state when His followers were left wondering (believing?) that the tyranny of evil had won.

On this day, I think it is important to think on those times when the world does feel like it is too much to live in. A friend of my late daughter’s wrote me saying how much she hates living in this timeline in which we are living. I agreed with her. I hate it too. This timeline is a time when so many in the world seem at odds with each other. It is a time when we begin to wonder if we will be subsumed by forces of evil, division, tyranny, and social upheaval.

During times like this, when we are consumed by all that we are seeing happening in our world, I think it is important that we say to each other: These days are hard. I don’t like them at all. I am afraid. I don’t know what is going to happen.

And I think it is equally important to listen to the ones who are saying these words, words about how we too may be feeling. As we listen, we don’t have to answer them. We just need to stand with them, or hold them, or just let them know that we hear them, understand, and also feel much the same way.

During these times we are grieving for things and times we cannot even name. We long for resolution for all that has been going wrong. We listen to others fears with a knowing heart because we can relate. We listen with no judgement. We acknowledge we have no answers or fixes.

We are not the first people in all of time who have gone through such troubling times.

Those early followers of Jesus, they were not just confused, and fearful, and unsure of the future, they were grieving.

They had just lost Jesus right after He had called them friends. After he had shown them how to lead, and serve, and love, by washing their feet. He had just shared a meal with them and told them to remember that meal and what he had done there in that place where they shared a meal.

Now, suddenly and unbelievably, He was gone, murdered on a cross by an evil empire.

War, When All We Want Is Peace

On my eighty-first birthday, Trump began a war.

I took it as a personal affront.

I know. I know. This war was not launched to offend me, but honestly, that is how it felt, When this president started a war, he totally ruined my birthday, and the lives of so many others who knew what the cost of this war would be and how it would be paid by us, the citizens of this country. (I know the rules. President should be capitalized, but I refuse to give this person that kind of recognition. He follows no rules, so I don’t follow punctuation rules regarding him either.)

Also, this president has not given us any substantial reasons why he started this war, so we might as well say, “He started it to make Sally upset and mad on her birthday when she reached the grand old age of eighty-one.

Thankfully, before I looked at the news the morning of my birthday, which also happened to be the day before we were to leave on our cruise, I had taken the time to sit down and write in my journal my thoughts and feelings about reaching my eighty-first birthday. I’ll share those with you on another occasion.

Today, April 4, 2026, on this day when we remember that we live in a world where there are wars we don’t want to be in, I am writing to you to let you know that I too am overwhelmed and upset by the state of affairs that we here in America find ourselves, but I also want to leave you with a message of hope as so many of us long for peace.

Where I Am Finding Hope and A Sense of Peace

When we first came back from our trip, I must admit that I resisted re-entering reality again.

On the first Sunday after our return I was struck by the collect of the day which we spoke and prayed through in church.

Almighty God, you alone can bring into order the unruly wills and affections of sinners: Grant your people grace to love what you command and desire what you promise; that, among the swift and varied changes of the world, our hearts may surely be fixed where true joys are to be found; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.1

This collect has been keeping my heart fixed on where true joy is to be found. I have found great comfort and hope for these days where we truly have been experiencing the swift and varied changes of the world.

As we live during these liminal spaces where so many are feeling so much uncertainty, a time where so many are feeling stress and distress, I hope you know you are not alone. We are all in this together.

I know we can’t all go on cruises to get away from it all, and while I’m grateful we could get away, I know that these hard and uncertain times we all are living in do come to an end. That is good part about being this age. That is the good part about having lived through many hard and troubling times full of uncertainty and loss.

During these times, we must again enter the world as it is, not how we wish it could be. We must care, support, encourage and love each other.

Thankfully, in the case of my husband and myself, we do feel refreshed and renewed, but we still are feeling the effects of all that is in upheaval in our world today.

I take great comfort in the words of Pope Leo, who in his homily on Thursday morning of this week spoke of how foreign the ways of this current Administration and its warlike mindset are from the “way of Jesus Christ.”2 He has reminded us of the true mission of Jesus remains. It is a way of peace, of liberation, of love.

As we move towards Easter, which is tomorrow, I hope you will find peace in the midst of the troubling times. That is my hope and prayer for my loved ones and for all of you. May you all have a very happy Easter whether you celebrate or not.

Peace be with you.

Sally

“Being good at untangling chains” is not on my resume, but despite the time it takes, I’m usually up for the challenge of untangling such messes and tangles; not just for the challenge of it all, but because I’m that one who is constantly trying to bring order to chaos. I’m the one needing to untangle the knots before I can get on with other tasks needing to be done.

On this day, one pesky knot refused to untangle. Each time I thought I had teased apart the knot keeping the pendant tangled up up in the chain, I’d find another knot to be picked apart.

This is a metaphor for my life, I thought as I determinedly sought to free the pendant from knots in the chain.

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Ever since the calendar flipped from 2025 to 2026, I have found it incredibly hard to write anything for public consumption. I have been writing, but for my eyes only. I’m heavily into the untangling of knots - the knots that get tangled up in my head as I try to tease apart the strands of my story that help me understand it for what it is, has been, and continues to be, and why I find part of my story so difficult to unravel.

It is not lost on me as I sit down to write today, February 16, 2026, that on this day sixty years ago, I first met the man who would forever change not just the trajectory of my life, but the one whose story is very much all knotted up in mine.

This man was my first husband, the father of my children, the one I married just six short months after I met him. I did not just marry a young man I fell madly in love with, instead when I linked my life to his we began writing a story together that is still being written to this day because we had children together, and that is where the lingering, complex connection comes in.

This story is also one requiring untangling, sorting, and trying to understand who I was before and after I linked my life to his. It is about claiming my own identity, how it was formed before him and by him, while also acknowledging that when I married him, I became caught up in a system I soon grew to recognize as a cult. Telling this story is not an easy task because I know the impact of my choices, and his, will reverberates down through the generations.

When, I married this man, the one one I met on this day sixty years ago, I cast my own not very well established or formed religious roots aside. I went against the wishes of my parents when I joined the Mormon Church, and then when I married this man just a month after my conversion, I entered into a cultural, social, familial, and religious system I really knew nothing about. (I know. I know. The Church does not like to be called Mormon. It wants to be identified as The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but who wants to type out all of those words? Also, back when I joined this organization, it had no problem being called the Mormon Church. And, old habits of what we call something die hard, at least for me.)

In a FaceBook post, Mary Karr, writing of her estrangement with her sister helped me understand my own need to untangle the knots in order to tease apart the strands of story with these words:

Rational thought has a rage for order or sense, a tidy finality.

She spoke also of how two things can both be true at the same time, which helps me understand even more deeply how I could have written these words about my ex-husband, a man from whom I was divorced over four decades ago.

Instructions on how to say goodbye

Remember our first hello? I was smitten the first time we met, but I’ve never said good-bye. It would have been so much easier on me, and probably on you too, if we had said our good-byes over forty years ago. Meant them. Kept them. Never had to say hello or good-bye again because it turns out that a divorce does not mean that you get to say good-bye when you have children, and we had five of them, so we just keep having to have some sort of communication, and at some point, it’s got to end, and it would be so much easier on me if it ends right now before we have any more times when we have to reconnect because we had children together and they get married and we both have go see them at those times, and even have to have our pictures taken together, and decide where we will stand, who we will be next to and how many people will be between us, and then we have those awkward moments of having to be charming around each other in case anyone is around us taking note of what we say or do. I don’t think any of the children will be getting married anytime soon. God forbid that they do, because as of right now three of the five are married, and I hope they stay that way. See there I go sharing tidbits about the kids with you. We just keep having to do that with each other.

Are good-bye’s even possible when you have a history like we do with so many players?

The hardest good-bye of all was when we both had to stand next to the body of our daughter after she took her life. It was a good-bye we had to say privately, individually when we were standing right next to each other, trying to comprehend that our beautiful girl was gone, and I have never felt more alone in a moment of grief, and yet, in that moment I knew there was only one other person among her two stepparents and her two parents who was as shattered as I was, and I wanted to reach out to you and hold you and be held by you and sob uncontrollably with you, but I didn’t.

We should say good-bye now. I think it might be easier if we did. But…

Will you remember the first hello?1

There is a whole ‘nother story, as they say, when it comes to the part of my story that I am most trying to tease apart today. It is the story of my life before I turned twenty-one, before I met the one who would forever change the trajectory of my life.

This story involves more about my family of origin, the home in which I was raised, the story of how that family structure, dysfunction, dynamic shaped me and ultimately led me to embrace a religion that seemed to me to be where one could create the perfect family structure, the type of family I deeply desired to create.

That story is harder for me to untangle. It is the story that so easily gets knotted up in my head as I try to write it, give myself permission to write it. It is the story I want to tell honestly, and well.

Memoir is meant to “tell the truth, but tell it slant.”2

Certainly, this is not the first time I’ve heard this quote by Emily Dickinson applied to writing memoir, but it is always good to remember this is why writing memoir is so hard.

My story is my story, but it has been lived with others who experienced what I experienced differently from how I experienced the same events.

Memoirist know this.

We still try to sort through the truth of our own experiences, understandings, memories. This is no easy task.

I know, as others have, when telling the truth, no matter how it is told, others will dispute our take on our own unique experiences, understandings, conclusions. This means what we have to say is not the only thing that may be disdained. We ourselves, our personhoods, may be disdained to point where we are forever cut out of the family circle.

The simple decision to name a church that one was once a member of a cult opens one up to contempt. It opens one up to being labeled bitter, misinformed, not worthy of respect.

Elissa Alman, in her book Permission, writes, “Words have power, and we hold responsibility for them.” Writing truly is, as she says, a moral minefield.

Interestingly, as I approach my eighty-first birthday which will occur on the last day of this month, the story of those years between 1966 and 1982, is not the story that I wish to untangle and understand or write about now.

I’ve done that. I probably have 30,000 words where I’ve tried to hone a story about what that part of my life was about and how it impacted me.

I’m finding now that it is the knotted up story3 of where I am in this juncture in life when it comes to my early years that I am interested in unraveling by writing about them in a safe place, my journal.

Perhaps that is the work that must be done by those us in the last decades of life. At eighty, I became more and more aware of how little time is left to have some sort of reckoning of who I am and how I became who I am now.

Dr. Alan Wolfelt says when we are grieving we must learn to say hello before we can say good-bye.

There are many paradoxes in mourning, in saying hello before we can say good-bye, and I have found that writing memoir is, in many ways, grief work. It is learning to go back to those earliest days of saying hello to life, to the people that populated my world in the formative years, how they may have helped, or even harmed me. It is about telling myself truth, sometimes painful truth about myself, or my own responses to life and to others around me. It is learning how to do this before I dare to write about the intersectionality of how the lives of others impacted me for good or for harm.

As Virginia Woolf said,

If you do not tell the truth about yourself, you cannot tell it about other people.

The story strands I am teasing apart seem to want to be told from the end of the story, being written over a lifetime; then, I find myself skipping very quickly to the very beginning as way to understand how I arrived to where I am today.

I’m mining to unearth those strands of silver that are rich veins of story telling me there has been both great pain and sorrow in my life, but also there has been unbelievable blessing and great beauty.

There is a form of alchemy that takes place as I write to extricate the stories which have become entangled with the narratives I’ve long told myself, or narratives I’ve heard, or imagined, others told about me. It is true, as Elissa Altman says: “Stories inhabit and possess us.” The hard part is finding what part of the story is not only our own story, but also, what part is ours to tell.

It is freeing to be in my eighties. It is freeing because I have absolutely no reason to feel I must reinvent myself. I am who I am, and I can live the rest of my days being that person who feels free to discover all that I am, and all that I ever have been or thought I was at the time.

At this age, as I write memoir, wherever I write it, in whatever format I find myself using to write it, I find I’m not focusing on trying to write the story as much as I hope to discover how the story has written me.4

This is how I’m saying a long hello to myself before it is time to say good-bye. Hopefully, I will get this memoir written before I’m gone. I’m very aware that I am running out of time to get it done*, but I take heart knowing I still can write, and my mother lived to be nearly 104.

*Note to self: this is not one task you can put off until the last minute.

I have been unable to write a word that seems appropriate to send out to you when there is so much heaviness in my heart, yet I also believe I must not remain silent in the face of so much civic unrest.

For days after Renee Nicole Good was killed, I could not write anything for public consumption. In shock, I sat in stunned silence for most of the day after her death. The next day, I realized I was grieving the death of this young woman from my very own home town who was shot in her car by an ICE agent as she sought to warn her neighbors of ICE activity in Minneapolis. The shock and the grief of that moment, stayed with me for days.

A few days later, after picking up a book by Henri Nouwen called The Wounded Healer, I realized, I was also suffering from feeling a sense of not understanding what on earth was happening in the world around me. I believe I could describe what I was feeling as: suffering from historical dislocation.

Robert Lifton wrote of this experience:1

It is a break in the sense of connection which men have long felt with the vital and nourishing symbol of their cultural tradition; symbols revolving around family, idea-systems, religion, and life-cycle in general.

Nouwen wrote The Wounded Healer in 1979, and the essential question the author hoped to answer was: How is one to minister to contemporary society?

In 1979, I was a 34 year old mother of five young children, and while we had many societal problems back then, I certainly could never have imagined that in the year I will turn 81, I would see what can only be described as “spontaneous executions in the street” by agents of the Government of United States.

I never would have thought I would be living in a land where I was seeing tyranny enacted in a city like Minneapolis.

I keep wondering what would Nouwen say about today? What would his response to the times in 2026 be?

Since Henri Nouwen is long dead, we must answer that question for ourselves. How are we to respond to all that is happening in our country, the United States of America, in 2026?

Then today, when I was determined to put some sort of newsletter together to send out through Substack, there was another shooting of an American citizen in Minneapolis.

Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse for the VA was shot ten times when he tried to help a woman agents from Customs and Border Patrol had pushed to the ground. Reportedly, his last words were to this woman as he tried to shield her from tear gas and lift her to her feet were, “Are you ok?”

None of us are ok.

Use Your Voice

David Gate wrote a wonderful poem with advice about how we are to respond to our times. I’m quoting part of it, but you can read the entire thing on Instagram2

Name the evil and the evil doers
who wear crosses around their necks
and wrap themselves in a flag
and quote the Bible like a hex.

Hold strong the line of power
protect the rights they are assulting
to speak, to vote, to gather
as they bully us to falter.

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Don’t Be Silenced. Keep A Record. Write About What Is Happening

While I have been unable to write on-line, I have been journaling. Many days I write by hand for nearly an hour. I have noticed a shift in my journal writing practice. I am beginning to keep a small record of what I am reading, both for leisure, and to stay informed about what is going on in the world in which I live.

I am also writing about my reaction to the news. I have not done much of this in the past except during the pandemic, but I am doing so now so my children and grandchildren know what I thought of all of the upheaval we are experiencing and how I am responding to it.

I am not a historian. I am a reader of history, and an observer of history being made. I am chronicler of the important events in my life, in the lives of my loved ones, and of the events in history that I have witnessed over the eight decades that my life has spanned.

Now more than ever, I believe my journal provides a place where I can be an ordinary citizen who writes in order to serve as a moral witness that cries out saying, “we once were not a nation like the one one we have become.” I write to leave a record. I write so I will remember none of what is happening is normal.

This shift in my journal writing in part is due to the influence of a book I have been slowly working my way though during the past year. The Diary Keepers by Nina Siegal. 3

When I first began reading this book, I must admit I never would have believed this quote found below could be applied to what is happening in Minneapolis in January of 2026.4

Now I see the importance of not only recording my own thoughts and views of what I am seeing from multiple sources about what is happening in the city under siege, but I am seeing just how important it is that others, especially those on the scene where peaceful protests are met with violent ICE agents, keep a photographic and written account of what is happening.

The Importance of Eye Witness Accounts

Consider these words stated shortly before his death by Isaac Schiper, a Jewish Polish historian murdered during the Holocaust.

Everything depends on who transmits our testament to future generations, on who writes the history of this period. Should our murderers be victorious, should they write the history of this war, our destruction will be presented as one of the most beautiful pages of world history, and future generations will pay tribute to them as dauntless crusaders. Their every word will be taken as gospel. Or they may wipe our very memory together, as if we had never existed, as if there had never peen a Polish Jewry, a gehetto in Warsaw, a Maidanek. Not even a dog will howl for us.

One of the most distressing things to me during the events I have witnessed on television, on the internet, or read about in multiple newspapers, has been the way our government officials have so quickly appeared at the podium to tell the public lies about what we have just witnessed with our very eyes thanks to the brave recorders of history who use their cell phones of video tape what is happening in real time.

This is nothing new. We have seen these same lies being spewed about what we witnessed in what has been the most heavily documented crime event in history on January 6, 2021.

None of what is happening on the streets in Minneapolis is new. Sadly, all of this has happened before during World War II which has been describe by the historian Peter Fritzsche as not just a “military conflict” but also as an assault on civilians.

Even if all you have ever read about those times is The Diary of Anne Frank, you have to know this is true: “The Nazi ideology of violence played out in urban centers, in public squares, on public transportation, and inside businesses and homes. Often it was characterized among neighbors, even within families.”

Now Is A Moment of Choosing.

Heather Cox Richardson has some clarity about what is happening in this moment.

She also has some advise.

I urge you to listen to her and make a choice. Are you going to stand on the side of Democracy? Are you going to stand for the rights we all have guaranteed under the Constitution of the United States? Or, are you siding with the likes of Stephen Miller who wants you to believe that your very existence is under siege by immigrants and you must stand by a government that will do ANYTHING to eliminate immigrants.

Donald Trump, Kristi Noem, and those in the employment of the Department of Homeland Security are lying to the American people about what those of us with a television or a cell phone can see is really happening before our very eyes.

As HCR says, all of this craziness could be stopped tonight if just sixteen (16) Republicans would vote with Democrats to end this nightmare that is happening as the American people are being terrorized by their own government.

We must call our Congressmen to act to stop this madness.

Take heart. Those of us willing to stand up to tyranny by speaking out, protesting peacefully, and standing with all the others doing the same are on the right side of history. Stay strong. Take care of yourselves. Take a nap if you need to. Take a walk. Emotion need motion. We are all in this together.

If this is all too much for you right now, reach out for help. Guard you mental health.

The NAMI HelpLine is: 1-800-950-6264 (M-F, 10 a.m. - 10 p.m. ET)

If you or a loved one is experiencing a crisis call or text 988 to connect with the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.

In liminal spaces, I welcome walking out of a space that no longer fits, a place I have moved beyond because I know I am ready to explore what lies beyond.

As a Colorado mountain girl, I have no illusions about exploring new paths. I know that if I have encountered a rocky path to get to where I am when on a walk or a hike, I will most likely continue to find a rocky path as I move forward. The path might get even rockier, but I also know I will learn more about myself as I keep on trekking on.

The past has taught me, I have both the vision and the courage to walk through a new doorway.

When this year ends, I will bid good-bye to the year where I turned eighty. I will be fully entering into my years as an octogenarian. As I pass through the milestone that marks fully living in my ninth decade of life, I find I need links to the past, reminders of what was behind to give me courage and strength to walk into the unknown even as I am grateful, ready, and curious to see what lies ahead.

I carry with me images of ancient rock walls built by generations before me because they speak to me of the legacy my ancestors left me that they once also walked the same path I am walking, and along the way they built strong, solid spaces to provide safety along the way.

There is a tension in aging. A physical, cognitive, and emotional tension between staying in a safe contained space, while also wishing to venture out to experience new spaces where one can continue to learn what is still out there to explore.

I’m grateful to end this year feeling very grounded in place where I am. I’m grateful that I am deeply connected to the roots from which I sprang. I live within miles of where I was born and spent my childhood. I live near places where my grandparents on both sides lived, loved, and explored. These deep connections to the past truly ground me, providing for me a known, safe landing space, but I find I am very much not done with exploring more spaces that may be more expansive as I long to keep growing and learning.

I am also very much reluctant to give up the safe, solid, steady, landing space I have created for myself and those I love. I call this wisdom speaking, but I do not want to stifle the desire I have to live more fully beyond my own four walls, literally and figuratively, as much as I can.

Ending 2025 and Beginning 2026

2025 proved to be one the very most challenging years of my life. I wrote those same words in my journal as 2024 ended. My daughter had become seriously ill just as 2023 ended and 2024 began. By the midpoint in the year, she would need both a kidney and liver transplant to keep on living. By what I will always call a miracle, she received both in September of 2024, and by the end of the year was thriving.

Then, in mid-2025, her husband became seriously ill, and he needed a liver transplant. How can this even be? He ended up having two liver transplants and multiple complications, yet again, miracle of miracles, he is also still with us and gaining his health back. He will need a kidney transplant in the coming year, and we are hopeful a live donor will come forth very soon.

We spent Christmas Day with them in their home. It was a beautiful, fun, and festive celebration. You can be sure of that! Amy brings so much fun to everything.

During 2025, as is my practice, I journaled nearly every single day. All my fears, prayers, joys, sorrows, worries, joys, experiences, were not captured, but most were. I filled up three journals writing 600 pages by hand. How many words is that?

Still I have no words for the year except to say by the grace of God we all have made it to this day and are moving into the next year with fresh hope for continued good health and restoration for all the one I love most because they too have had their challenges, their hardships, their pivots, their joys, their victories and their new beginnings that have come, some by choice, some not by choice.

When 2024 ended, I wrote that my word for the year was presence. In my journal I wrote I was tired of living in my head, and I said I was going forward asking an essential question that I found in a quote by Henri Nouwen: “…am I taking my wounds to my head or to my heart?”

The question came as I thought of the memoir I have worked on in spurts for years. I knew I could not move forward in writing of it if it was to remain just a recounting of sequences, stories, events, experiences. If a memoir is to be finally written and completed by me, it must be work of the heart. I wanted whatever my story has to say to be an expressed with words that express emotion, not just thoughts. That is a hard task for me.

Learning to be fully present to everything in my life was a goal for 2025. Be careful what you ask for. As Kate Bowlers says, Everything happened.

John O’Donohue gave me inspiration for my word of the year for 2025:

The glory of human presence is the divine longing fully alive.

Journaling helped me to be more present to my life as it really was and how I was choosing to live it. Reminding myself to be present with and to others helped me overcome my need to fix everything for everyone whether they wanted me to or not.

I overmom (new word: I am momming everything and everyone. I am mom. I will fix that. I will do that. I will mom. I will tell you what to do and how to do it. Mom is a verb.) My kids (grown ass adults) may disagree, but I feel like I was better at not momming all the time this year. I feel like I was better at being present and being supportive without feeling like I was responsible to do anything except be there with the kind of ear, shoulder, resource, or prayer that was needed and asked for before I offered.

I’m proud of how I learned to be present and practice presence this year. I still have more to learn.

I’m moving into 2026 with a new word: trust. That will be a challenge to do! More on that later.

In this liminal space, as I close out 2025 and enter 2026, I’m leaning into a blessing written by John O’Donohue which was my prayer for year. I think I’ll need it again as I move forward, so I’m going to copy it here for you and for me. 1

May you awaken to the mystery of being hear and enter
the quiet immensity of your own presence.
May you have joy and peace in the temple of your senses.
May you receive great encouragement when new frontiers
beckon.
May you respond to the call of your gift and find the
courage to follow its path.
May the flame of anger free you from falsity.
May warmth of heart keep your presence aflame and may
anxiety never linger about you.
May outer dignity mirror an inner dignity of the soul.
May you take time to celebrate the quiet miracles that
seek no attention.
May you be consoled in the secret symmetry of your soul.
May you experience each day as a sacred gift woven
around a heart of wonder.

I love every line, every word of this blessing and truly hope to see it lived out in my life.

Happy New Year!

Thanks for being here in 2025. May your new year be full of blessing of love, joy, and peace. May divisions be healed. May we strive towards equality and justice for all. May we encourage and support each other along the way. Take heart. We are all in this together.

XO

Sally

Thank you dear readers for all the love and support you have given me during the past year! It means more to me than you know. Please hit the ❤️ to support my work . This helps make my writing discoverable here. You know how it is with algorithms! If you haven’t already, you can download the app to read my writing and the writings of so many others. You can share my posts on Substack which really helps me grow in recognition as a Substack writer too.

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“The celebration of Advent is possible only to those who are troubled in soul, who know themselves to be poor and imperfect, and who look forward to something greater to come. ”~Dietrich Bonhoeffer

As I ponder, this quote by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, I am reminded of another Christmas Season when I was so “troubled in soul” and very poor.

The year was 1982.

The place was Ogden, Utah.

After sixteen years of marriage, earlier in that fateful year, unemployed, and a stay at home mom to five children under the age of fifteen, I suddenly found myself

with no means of financial or physical support when my husband left the family home. By the time Christmas rolled around that year, our situation was dire. I had no money at all. I was also under protective orders because of the physical abuse that I suffered at the hands of this man.

In November of that year, I had made a very major change in my religious and social life. I had left the Mormon Church, publicly declaring that I was renouncing my belief in it and my affiliation with it as I went forward to rededicate my life to Jesus Christ in a tiny Baptist church in my neighborhood.

To say that my life was upended with that decision is an understatement. Despite the upheaval of my circumstances, my faith was strong, and my life felt more anchored than it ever had been before.

A few weeks before Christmas, I was asked to share my story of redeeming grace at a shelter for the homeless that was sponsored by Christian churches in the area. When I returned home that day, I wondered how much longer I could survive before I too might be among the homeless, and yet that possibility did not really seem to be a probability as I knew that in time the legalities of a divorce would provide for the basic needs for my children and for myself as we would move into the future. I had returned to college and was working towards a teaching certificate, so I had hope for a future career.

The worry looming the largest in my mind was about how I would give my children some sort of Christmas. I went out for a run/walk and cried out to the Lord about my circumstances as my feet beat against the pavement. “Lord,” I prayed, “I just want my kids to have a Christmas Day that does not make them feel impoverished. Please provide us with what I will need for a Christmas meal, a gift for each child, and some simple pleasures like cookies and peanut brittle.” Making homemade peanut brittle was tradition that went back to memories of Christmas I had as a child.

The next day, my door bell rang. The chaplain from the homeless shelter was at my door. He said that they had decided that my family needed a Christmas gift box after hearing my story. I felt a bit awkward as I graciously thanked him for bringing us the gift. I’d never had to receive such gifts before. Usually, we were the ones having the kids buy a gift for those less fortunate as we gathered canned goods from our stock to share with others.

After the chaplain left, I gratefully began to take the contents from the box: a turkey, ten pounds of potatoes, canned goods including cranberry sauce, gifts for the children, sugar, flour, one pound of real butter, and, (can you believe it?) corn syrup and Spanish peanuts! Who puts Spanish peanuts in a Christmas box for the less fortunate? The short answer is: God does. I had every ingredient to make peanut brittle!

Whenever I begin to doubt God’s Providence and how He has always been faithful to provide for me, I remember those Spanish peanuts. There is not doubt that God heard my prayer that day when I wondered how I would provide for my children. He answered with this: I will provide. I will always provide. I will provide to uttermost. I will put Spanish peanuts in a box to help you remember that I am faithful.

Christmas miracles come in unexpected ways.

I have been reminded over and over again, that I can’t and shouldn’t get so caught up in providing perfect gifts and experiences for my loved ones; instead, I am to remember that in weakness and in dependence we most come to know the exceedingly miraculous good news that Jesus Himself is the only true and lasting gift that we can either give or receive.

As Bonhoeffer said, He is the reason we “look forward to something greater to come.”

This year, as 2025, comes to an end, so many are weary, and needy, and sad, and in deep grief. We long for better things to come as we move towards the new year.

We may feel very alone.

We long for a Christmas miracle.

Take heart.

The Christmas Miracle is best found when we are feeling most troubled and vulnerable. The One who came to us on Christmas Day seeks the poor in spirit.

“It is an exceedingly strange and seemingly ridiculous plan. In a world drunk with a desire for power and filled with those who take what they want by force, the miracle of Christmas is one of weakness not strength. It is a suggestion that divine love is more powerful than we think.” ~ Esau Mccaulley, Instagram quote, December 23, 2021

My prayer for each of you is that you will find comfort and strength from this beautiful passage in Isaiah.1

“Fear thou not; For I am with thee: be not dismayed; for I am thy God: I will strengthen thee; yea, I will help thee; yea, I will uphold thee with the right hand my righteousness. ”~ Isaiah 41:10 KJV

We are not alone, my dear friends. God Himself knows of our every need. May you experience your very own Christmas miracle this year. Let me know if it includes Spanish peanuts.

Dear Readers,

Thank you for your support this year! Words cannot express my gratitude for the ways you have shown love and support for my family as we have gone through a difficult year. I hope you have a very Merry Christmas! God Bless you all!

XO

Sally

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This December has brought senseless and devastating murders to the United States and in Australia. During the season we like to think of the season of light, we have witnessed so much darkness. I have struggled to make sense of such darkness. I don’t think I am alone in feeling there is no way to make sense of such senseless loss of life.

I’ve wondered as Christians light Advent candles representing peace, hope, joy, and love if for many the lighting of these candles is just a ritualistic practice that have no meaning?

Whether you join in lighting candles to celebrate Advent or Hanukkah or not, I think we all can agree in all this darkness, we have needed much light.

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I have been struck by a sense of juxtaposition with each lighting of Advent candles and with each night’s lighting of the Menorah during Hanukkah because of the darkness and devastation recent days have bought to many.

Then I find I have more questions…

How are our broken hearts to respond to the messages of joy the season brings?

How are we to find the courage and the hope we need to light candles against the darkness?

Theodore Roethke wrote In a dark time, the eye begins to see…1

How can an eye begin to see in dark times?

The Dark Night of The Soul

Recently, I spent some time writing a book review of A Grace Disguised by Jerry Stittser2 for a newsletter for a local grief support group with which, I, as a certified grief counselor, have been involved for the past few years.

When I lost my own daughter to suicide fifteen years ago, I read Sittser’s book, and it became for me one of the most important and helpful books I read as I was trying to walk through the early days of the devastating and unknowable grief I experienced after her death.

One metaphor from the book profoundly helped me in my own struggle with finding hope after devastation. The metaphor Sittser describes came to him after he experienced terrible existential darkness during the aftershock of grief he suffered as he grappled with how to go on in life.

Seeking light and escape, he had a disturbing dream where he was running desperately after the sun. After relating the dream to his sister, she gave him this advice:

…the quickest way for anyone to reach the sun and the light of day is not to run west, chasing the setting sun, but to head east, plunging into darkness until one comes to the sunrise.

He had choice in how he responded to terrible loss and darkness. He chose to not run from darkness. He entered it by facing his pain while expecting a good tomorrow.

In my grief support training, in my reading about grief, and in my personal response to grief, I believe this truth that we learn from a paradox is true: The griever must make friends with darkness before he or she can enter the light.

How is one to do that?

Grieve Well by Honoring Your Need to Grieve

We live in a grief avoidant culture. We are often embarrassed by or try to hide our own tears, our own broken hearts, our grief. We don’t want to burden others with our thoughts, our fears, our emotions. We don’t even know how to respond to our friends when they are grieving. We think, Oh, I better not bring up her husband that died six months ago, she might be trying to get over it and it will make her sad if I bring him up.

Wrong!

Believe me. She/He has not gotten over it and she/he probably wants nothing more than to talk about the one they lost, the one they think of constantly, the one they want to see and touch and listen to again.

Not talking about it never helped anyone navigate the grief one is feeling.

We best honor our need to grieve well when we learn to make friends with and walk through darkness. When we do this, we begin to recognize and accept that after great loss what we are going through is normal.

Great loss leads to a period of darkness. This too is normal.

Dr. Alan Wolfelt, writes, the feelings we feel during this time of darkness are signs of a deeply profound, spiritual crisis.3

Because grief affects all aspects of our lives - our physical, cognitive, emotional, social, and spiritual selves - it is fundamentally a spiritual journey…

significant loss plunges you into what C.S. Lewis, Eckhart Tolle and various Christian mystics have called “the dark night of the soul.”

When one is suffering in a period of darkness after great grief, it seems impossible to believe life could ever hold joy again.

Grief invites the griever to enter a liminal space, a place where you are between where you once were but not yet where you hope to be. It is a place where you can dose your pain at your own speed, where you can take the slow steps towards walking into the light by caring for yourself by expressing your thoughts and emotions to others, by taking naps if necessary, getting enough sleep and exercise, and by eating well.

This stage in grief requires movement. Dr. Wolfelt says, “Emotions need motion.” I love that phrase. It has guided my own response to overwhelming emotions many times.

Grieving well is a radical act in a culture that encourages the denial of pain and suffering, but it is the way you best honor your grief.

Facing the pain of such darkness and walking through it is painful, but it is not a “bad” or negative thing to do. Our culture have made authentic mourning something to be avoided at all costs.

The eye begins to see points of light in the darkness. That is one of the paradoxes that the griever begins to understand. All is not dark. There is light. The light, even small points of light, shines on and calls the griever into life.

Light in The Darkness

While naming and facing the darkness is an important step to learning how to live after great loss, I also believe we must also begin to name those points of light that show us beauty, hope, peace, and joy.

Often the points of light arrive because others light candles for us against the darkness. We need others to sit with us in the dark night of the soul.

Mister Rodgers said, “Look for the helpers.” I would add, “Look for the ones who come with lighted candles.”

Paradoxes everywhere create a tension we must learn to live in if we are to have eyes that begin to see in the dark.

One of my favorite verses is found in Psalm 30:5

Life comes to us again after a great shattering. Kate Bowler remind us of this with these wonderful words: 4

Advent joy is not glittery optimism. It’s God slipping into the world, not to erase our sorrows, but to dwell with us in them—and to teach us how to laugh, sing, and bless in spite of them.

As I think of God “slipping into the world” and all that Kate has to say about this, I am reminded of a poem by Rainer Marie Rilke.

God speaks to each of us as God makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.
These are the words we dimly hear:
You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.
Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don't let yourself lose me.
Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.
Give me your hand.

In that long night when darkness is deep, light a candle. Watch and wait. The psalmist promises that despite the weeping, joy comes in the morning.

As we make our way towards Christmas Day, the day we celebrate the birth of the One who brings light to the world, I hope you will remember these words written in The Message:

He came to walk ‘with us silently out of the night’, to walk with us in our sorrows. He came to call us to life. He came to bring us great joy.

May you all have a very Merry Christmas.

XO

Sally

The rituals of holiday were created for me as a child. Now, those from the generation before me are gone, but those times when we gathered around the holiday table created connections that remain. The traditions, the rituals, the connections become an important part of the legacy of family which I hope my children and grandchildren will embrace and continue long after I am gone.

Cousins gathered in giddy anticipation of family celebrations create powerful memories that last a lifetime. Cousins share a family history that spans the generations from childhood to old age. Cousins remain connected long after the aunts and uncles are gone.

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Filed away in memory bank are many wonderful memories of Thanksgivings from long ago. Thanksgivings when I was a child were always spent at the home of my grandparents.

Sorting through those memories, certain images stand out in my mind:

The dining room table, large, solid, and the dominating feature

of the room where my grandparents spent most of their time,

was set for dinner long before the guests arrived.

The silver had been polished days before.

The china had been removed from the china buffet to be placed

on white linen table cloths.

Each place setting was perfectly placed according to rule of etiquette.

We learned the rules of etiquette at home and at my grandmother’s table.

“Where is the salad plate?” my father would ask if his place setting was not properly set for even the simplest of meals.

Good manners were very much a part of my family narrative.

I have vivid memories of Grandma and the aunts bustling around the kitchen,

best dresses covered with aprons,

shooing all the kids out of the kitchen

as they fill china dishes with Thanksgiving fare.

“Get out of the kitchen,”

we were told as the cousins and I ran excitedly around the circle that connected

the dining room, the kitchen, the bedroom where my grandparents slept, and the hallway to the bathroom and stair that led upstairs.

“Stop chasing each other. Someone will get hurt.”

Indeed,

I did get hurt.

I was barely three, or maybe younger,

when playing a game of chase around that circle I fell,

hit the foot of that gigantic and very solid oak dining room table.

I knocked out one of my front teeth.

Was that on Thanksgiving, or Christmas?

Either way, the story became a part of my personal narrative of why I had a missing front tooth from the earliest days of childhood.

Grandma was a wonderful cook.

Her Thanksgiving dinners were the best.

So, was Christmas dinner.

She made amazing pies,

but her homemade candy was what we really looked forward to eating.

The trappings of Thanksgiving long ago created a rich tapestry of visual images that formed a template in my mind of how Thanksgiving should always look.

The table laden with food, the china, the silver, did not fully represent the perfect template for Thanksgiving.

All of those trappings would be absolutely meaningless if family were not there.

Family coming together to celebrate created the perfect blueprint for a what I remember best about Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving memories are priceless because the memories focus on family.

Time stands still in those black and white achieved photos from long ago.

Time with

grandparents,

parents,

aunts and uncles,

and cousins

made Thanksgiving my favorite holiday of all.

My father, mother, and Aunt Katherine on Thanksgiving sometime in the 50’s.

Look at all those homemade pies!

A photo of my cousins and I captured on Thanksgiving of 1963, when we all gathered a my grandmothers. I think it was the last of such large gatherings. I am second from the left in the back row.Next to me is my cousin Steven. He was killed in Viet Nam when he was only nineteen just a few short years later.

There is a sort of passing of the baton that takes place in families as one generation ages and the next takes over the hosting of Thanksgiving.

This year with more gratitude than I can ever express, we will gather at my daughter’s house to celebrate Thanksgiving and to give thanks for the miracle of Jewett being well enough to insist that he and Amy host us all for their thanksgiving feast.

This photo was taken four years ago, but you will be pleased to know that Jewett was brining the turkey yesterday, and perched on a bar stool at the kitchen counter, he was making the traditional stuffing for the turkey.

We are all so very grateful for the miracle of healing we have seen this year. The path to recovery will be a long one, but our loved one is on it. To see Amy and Jewett back at in the kitchen cooking up a Thanksgiving meal for all of us is a miracle. I was told I was to sit down and stay out of the way, and thankfully, I’m glad to do that. I’m not sure I’m much help in the kitchen these days.

Thank you for all of the support of money, kind words, and prayers that you have sent our way during the past year. Words can never express how grateful I am to be able to celebrate with my dearly loved children this year.

For now, I’m off to get the green beans at the grocery store because Amy doesn’t have that one very important ingredient for her green bean casserole, and what WOULD Thanksgiving be without that? Hopefully, the store is out of green beans!

One last thing: I’m grateful for all of you! HAPPY THANKSGIVING! 🦃

As is my practice, I began my day by writing in my journal. This practice of daily writing has been one of the most important ways I have been able to fully express all I have experienced as I have grieved the loss of my daughter after she died by suicide in 2010.

Over the past year, I began a new practice of reading entries written in old journals that correspond with the current day’s date but were written ten years ago, five years ago, and a year ago. This practice has been quite informative. I’ve seen how I have changed in perspective on many things, and have also noted I have not changed my views and perspectives on other things during the passage of time.

I guess you can say, somethings never change, but I must also conclude and state that everything has changed in other ways.

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There was a time when my children first launched into adulthood when they would call to discuss with me a challenge they were facing, or perhaps they were trying to decide on a which path to take when they faced the proverbial fork in the road.

I would ask, “How will this decision impact the scope of your life if you apply the ten minute, ten week, ten month, or ten year rule to what you decide to do?”

There are decisions we make life that impact the ones we love most in devastating ways in fewer than ten minutes after the decision is made.

Those decisions can impact others for generations to come.

Some of those decisions cannot be reversed, and the effects of the decision reverberate over and over in lives of others until the day we leave this life.

If Only My Daughter Would Have Reached Out…

On May 29, 2010, my thirty-four year old daughter Julie died by suicide.

I am left to wonder, if Julie would still be with us if she’d just thought about that question I asked her many times before:

“How will this decision impact the scope of your life if you apply the ten minute rule, ten week, ten month, or ten year rule to what you decide to do?”

The decision to die by suicide is one of those decisions that can’t be reversed.

Before I write anymore about being a survivor of suicide loss, I beg those who might be considering suicide to get help today. There are many resources available for you. Do not suffer alone.

If you know someone you fear may be at risk for suicide, know there are resources for you also.

988 is the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.

There are many who care.

Reach out and get help if you are contemplating suicide or you know someone who is at risk.

If You Are A Survivor of Suicide, Give Yourself Space to Grieve.

I did not journal consistently until 2010.

After my daughter’s death, I took up my pen and I began to write.1

I wrote in an attempt to integrate Julie’s life and death into the fabric of my life.

I wrote because I had no idea how to integrate the life and death of my dearly beloved daughter into the fabric of my life, and I still don’t, but I continue to write as a way to open up my own heart and mind to understand the new path I found myself on because of the decision my daughter made in a moment of intense pain to end her life.

I often think of how one of the first things I wrote in my journal after her death in 2010, was that I intended to integrate her death into my life. I did not want to compartmentalize. I did not want to dissociate. I did not want to stop living. I did not want to stop loving. I just want to make sense of something that made no sense to me.

Writing has allowed to me come to a place of accepting that I will never make sense of a thing that makes no sense.

Writing has allowed me to honor my grief by giving me a place where I could express my pain, my hurt, my disappointment, my anger, my broken heart. It has been one way I have been able to understand my grief, and it has been one way I have been able to move from grief to mourning.

“Grieving Look Different for Everyone.”

I chose not to read my journals from 2010, this year even though, it would have made sense to do so because this year marks the fifteen year mark since Julie’s death. I’m not sure why I made the decision not to read those journals, but I think it is important to acknowledge during much of 2010 and even 2011, I was was very much suffering from the trauma her death brought into my life and into the lives of the ones who loved her most.

Since that time, I have taken coursework to become a certified grief counselor by taking courses offered by Dr. Alan Wolfelt. I am indented to him and the work that he has done to help so many understand loss, grief, and mourning.

I am especially indebted to the work he has done for those of us struggling through the loss of one who has died by suicide.

Suicide grief = TRAUMA2

My notes on suicide grief trauma: An injury; something hurtful. The wounding of your emotions, your spirit, your beliefs about yourself and the world, your will to live, your dignity, you sense of security.

Dealing with suicide grief trauma is not linear.

Dr. Wolfelt says 80% of the time working with suicide loss survivors is helping them with backward looking.

Looking back…

A haiku I wrote about Julie after she came to me in a dream after her death:

Etherial, timeless.

Welcomed intangible presence.

Dear daughter, please stay.

Remembering you…

A note about you, Julie, that was brought to mind after a conversation with Amy in 2016.

Amy called today to read me a birthday poem Julie had written her in 2002. First, I was struck by the writing talent Julie had. She was such a gifted writer. I’m grateful to be surrounded by her many writings, journals, scrapbooks, and photos that Julie had created. She was good at documenting her life.

At times I see her so clearly in my mind. I’m grateful I spent so much time gazing on and admiring her features when she was alive.

I was fascinated by her character traits.

She was a beautiful, complex, intriguing woman of great talent and possessed a vibrant personality.

She also suffered greatly from depression. I remember those dark days too. Those days were so hard for me, but they must have been so much worse for her. I hate that she suffered so greatly from a disease that she fought so valiantly for so long.

Julie was always a champion of me. She was always so loving and supportive. I could not make sense of how one who hated to see anyone or anything hurt or suffering could act in such a way that she left so many of us shattered and brokenhearted.

I believe she would not have left us if she had known the hurt her leaving would cause us.

If she had known the path she left me on when she left would be so hard for me to navigate, she would not have left. I truly believe that because it was so out of character of her to leave me and all of us on such a path of confusion, suffering, grief, and sorrow.

The last time Julie and I walked a path together was March 7, 2010. It was Amy’s birthday weekend, so I’d made the trip up north to celebrate the occasion with both my youngest daughters.

The two girls went running and they took me with them. At some point, they ran on without me and I slowly walked the path alone.

Before they left, Julie, always so protective, put her arm around me and said, “We’ll be back Mom. Enjoy your walk.”

I did. It had been a hard winter that year. Along the way, I snapped a photo of a robin on a fence with my Blackberry, the first ruby breasted beloved bird I saw of the season. I noted the date in my journal as I often do when I see my first robin, a harbinger of spring that I always look forward to.

Never could I have imagined what loss would enter my life before that spring gave way to summer.

“Healing Takes Time.”

The path I have walked since that day in March of 2010, when I last walked with Julie, has been a path where I have moved from grieving into active mourning.

Grief: the internal response to loss - my own thoughts and feelings after loss.

Mourning: the outward expression of grief. Grief gone public. A shared social response to grief.3

Writing has been one of the most important ways I have been able to mourn well. It has allowed me to acknowledge all the pain and grief I have felt over the loss of Julie and others in my life. It is one way I have been able to embrace the pain of such loss while also remembering the one or ones I have loved.

By writing, I have acknowledged that I have been changed. I am not the same person I once was.

One is changed by loss, but one also grows.

The soul expands as one actively mourns and searches for meaning in the days that remain after great loss.

I wrote these words in 2014, four years after Julie’s death:

At first I vowed Julie’s death would not change me. How naive was that? I will never ever be the same.

I hope my capacity to love, to forgive, to seek understanding, and live more fully will be the result of having worked through the grief of losing my beloved Jules.

Holidays Are Hard After Loss

As we approach the holiday season, many of you may be grieving many losses. I hope you will be able to honor your grief AND live fully as you move into the days ahead.

I have learned that grief does not mean that I am expected to stop living. Instead, I have learned it is important live fully the days I have left.

It is important to acknowledge that holidays bring with them memories both happy and sad. Often, we are reminded of those no longer with us, and dread the holidays as they approach.

My daughter-in-law Sheridan was my daughter Julie’s dear friend, and it was at Julie’s memorial service where my son Ryan met our lovely Sheridan.

Blessings come from loss.

I’m so grateful for the family that was created because of a lasting and long friendship between Julie and Sheridan.

One Thanksgiving, we celebrated at Ryan and Sheridan’s home. Sheridan and Ryan honored Julie in this way: her ashes were on the mantle and an empty chair reminded us of the one we missed and wished was with us to share the joyous day.

I remember thinking as I looked at the empty chair that Julie would not be in it even if she were with us. She had way too much energy for that. She would be cooking and cleaning and arranging, and laughing, and joking, and loving on her nieces and nephews.

I will always miss her arm on my shoulder as she would have stood beside me in a photo we might have taken, but I think she’d be happy to know that I am living my life as fully as I can.

I’m still on the path of healing and transformation.

To Other Survivors of Suicide Loss

If you are also a survivor of suicide loss, know you are not alone. I am walking that same path with you. I pray you are finding companions for the journey. I pray that you are being sustained by the presence of others. I pray that you find healing along the way.

I leave you with the words by Dr. Wolfelt,

If anyone deserves to wear a shirt declaring the designation of transplant warrior, it is Jewett! Honestly, the truth about the subheading on his shirt needs acknowledgement too: giving up is not an option.

Jewett has demonstrated, and continues to demonstrate, the embodiment of warrior over the past three months. Look at him! He is a walking miracle.

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Homecoming!

It is no small thing to celebrate this homecoming of Jewett’s. No small thing at all.

It is a miracle.

Even his doctors, and all familiar with the details of his complex case, will affirm Jewett won a battle against odds not stacked in his favor. His recovery is astounding.

We’ve Had Our Miracles - Lots of Them

The Sunday after Jewett came home, I had a chance to give the good news of Jewett’s homecoming to our Episcopalian priest. “We’ve had our miracles, lot’s of them, ” I said.

She agreed. She knows how many times we, and so many others, have prayed, and prayed, and prayed for miracles. She also knows we have had answers to those prayers. “It is all a miracle,” she said, and then she added words I’ll never forget: “You are a collector of miracles.” 1

Liminal Spaces - the places where we wait, watch, and pray for miracles.

When Jewett first became sick, I think we all were crazy with shock and disbelief. I remember walking into the waiting room for the ICU at the University of Colorado Anshutz feeling like I was going to throw up from all the stress, anxiety, and disbelief that was pulsing through my body.

Call it PTSD because probably that is what I was feeling. Probably PTSD is what we all were feeling because who ends up in the transplant world for the second time in less than a year because a family member again needs yet another transplant?

After waiting for what seemed to be an eternity in the waiting room at the hospital, when I could finally entered Jewett’s room in the ICU because visitors are limited in number, the situation seemed all the more surreal because we as a family were again in that absolutely horrible liminal space which I hope to never visit again.

It is the liminal space of knowing a loved one would definitely need a liver transplant yet also waiting for his or her MELD score to be high enough to be placed on the list to receive a liver.2

I think collectively, we all were trying to make sense of how we ended up in this place. We hugged, spoke kind and supportive words to each other, and then stood wordlessly in shock.

For some reason, I turned and saw Jewett alone in his bed and seemingly alone in his thoughts. “What must he be thinking?” I wondered.

I turned my attention to him, and decided against small talk. I don’t remember exactly what I said as I assured him I loved him and I would be praying for him, but I remember saying,

You’re going to ok Jewett. You will be ok. You’re going to make it.

I saw a small tear trickle out of his eye and he grasped my hand and held it tightly.

So many times in the three months as he fought for his life, I remembered my words.

I do refuse to be a purveyor of false hope. I don’t typically go around telling people that every prayer will be answered in the affirmative, and I certainly am not one to promise healing when I am not God, and I really don’t know how God will work in any situation that I pray about.

Mostly, as time passed, I reminded myself that I had uncharacteristically said these words to Jewett because in that moment I truly believed God would carry him through, and I wanted him to know it.

Did I have occasion to doubt that he would make it? Yes, I actually did.

Once.

Most of the time, I just kept reminding God that he had given us miracles, and I was grateful, but I was asking for more.

There is a passage in Luke where Jesus tells his disciples a parable about praying. He illustrates the parable by telling of a wicked judge and a persistent widow who kept coming to him with her requests. Finally, the judge is worn down by the widow’s continual coming to him seeking justice and grants her request.3

This passage has spoken volumes to me throughout those times in my life when I felt like that widow who kept pleading with the judge for justice, but perhaps the part of that entire passage I love best is when Jesus tells his disciples, they need to pray always and not to lose heart.

You know, it is easy to lose heart in those months of being in liminal spaces waiting for for yet another miracle.

There is one who stayed with Jewett through all those hours in that liminal space when it would have been easy to lose heart. That one is my daughter Amy. She moved into that hospital room and stayed there. It was clear she was not leaving without him walking out with her. She also is a transplant hero, a double transplant hero, in my eyes.

Liminal spaces where we wait and pray can become so dark. They can be disorienting. Being in those spaces can cause us to doubt, even as we wait hoping against hope at times.

“Faith is a way of waiting—never quite knowing, never quite hearing or seeing, because in the darkness we are all but a little lost. There is doubt hard on the heels of every belief, fear hard on the heels of every hope, and many holy things lie in ruins because the world has ruined them and we have ruined them. But faith waits even so, delivered at least from that final despair which gives up waiting altogether because it sees nothing left worth waiting for. Faith waits—for the opening of a door, the sound of footsteps in the hall, that beloved voice delayed, delayed so long that there are times when you all but give up hope of ever hearing it. And when at moments you think you do hear it (if only faintly, from far away) the question is: Can it possibly be, impossibly be, that one voice of all voices?”4

Those last lines penned by Frederick Buechner sum the feeling one has in those liminal spaces, and when we finally cross over to the new space where prayers have been answered and the miracle is right there before our very eyes. In this case for me it was seeing Jewett sitting his chair in his home watching his CU Buffs play football.

All seemed right with the world again.

Jewett has been restored and returned to us and to his home.

He is ok.

He is more than ok.

Thanks be to God.

Thank you to all who have prayed for Jewett and for Amy as we have gone through this difficult season. He is still recovering. The recovery will take as long as it takes.

His medical expenses continue to be great, and as I have mentioned before, Jewett and Amy are having to COBRA their medical insurance because Jewett had just left his old job when he became ill and was set to begin a new job on July 14. A GoFundMe account has been established to help Amy and Jewett with their medical expenses. I have provided a link to that account.

From now until the end of 2025, money from all new paid subscriptions to Strands of Silver will be go to help cover COBRA and other medical expenses for Amy and Jewett. I have already been able to donate money from paid subscriptions for this newsletter to Amy and Jewett! Thank you!

Your paid subscriptions support me and my work here on Substack and the money itself goes to Amy and Jewett as they continue to navigate the days ahead.

Finally, a click on the ❤️ helps my post be found by others. Comments are deeply appreciated, and they also help others find my writing. That is how the algorithm works.

I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in this feeling. We all have our life events that are occurring simultaneously with what is going on in the world at large.

What are you doing when life gets too lifey for you? Seriously, I’d like to know.

When life gets too lifey for me, I tend to get quiet as I try to process all that is swirling around me.

During this most recent season of late summer and early fall, when I so often felt like I was in a state of overwhelm, from one day to the next, I kept my eyes open for any movement in a positive direction when it came to the concerns I carry closest to my heart. 1

As September began, I was so very weary even my prayers began to lack any vibrancy. I needed a change of scenery. I needed a short get-a-way. I knew no real escape from our present realities was possible, and I didn’t need that as much as I needed a fresh perspective on how to dwell in the present.

Since we also have been focused on adjusting to and training our new little puppy, I knew wherever we went, it had to be close to home, and it needed to be a dog friendly place.

We headed up the closest mountain pass to see the kinetic art feature that had been installed in Green Mountain Falls, Colorado.

I didn’t know it when I headed out to see this unique kinetic art piece, but if there ever was a time when I needed a chance to see nature interact with art, it was on that day.

After days of rain, the soft mountain breezes that rippled through this amazing work both uplifted my spirits and soothed my worried heart. I could finally breathe peacefully as I watched how color and light played in the wind creating not just a new perspective on accepting that things never stay the same, nor should they, but also I found myself welcomeing whatever the next season had to offer with renewed courage.

As I sat watching colorful ripples above my head, I realized how much beauty and peace is created when we accept how winds of change can bring about miracles we hope for but wonder if we will ever see.

On the second day of September, the day after I had gone to visit my daughter Amy and her husband Jewett in the hospital where he been since early in July, I wrote a word in my journal which had come to me that morning. For some reason, I could not get the word out of my mind.

Was it a foreshadowing word?

Was it a word to apply as my word for the month much like I choose a word for the year?

I wasn’t sure.

I just wrote it down, and after looking up its definition, I hoped that September would bring a fulfillment of the word that came to me.

The word was: auspicious.

May we as a family experience an auspicious month. May we all experience a month of promising success, favorable outcomes. Especially may Jewett, Amy, and Jon (my son) be most fortunate as we head into this month and throughout all of it. We need a good, positive, auspicious turn of events for their lives.

Pausing to pray.2

May it be so, dear Lord.

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September ~ A Season of Hope for An Abundant Harvest

September is one of my favorites months. I think back to those days when my children were young, all living under one roof with me and with their father in Ogden, Utah. We lived in a house built on land that had once been an old peach orchard. Three or four of those old, still producing, peach trees remained when we lived there.

September days brought peach trees heavy with fruit waiting to be harvested.

I remember those days as such a busy happy time as I was: picking fruit and canning it, picking tomatoes and canning them while also caring for five children born in a span of ten years. Now, I look back and wonder how I did it all.

I’ve thought back to those days, busy, busy, days, often lately. I’ve also thought about all that went into the harvesting of what we grew and preserving it so we would supplement our food supply throughout the winter.

Now, as I feel the summer air shift in the autumnal air, I find myself saying, “The air is changing. It is not just getting cooler, I can sense the time for harvest is near. It is so near, I can almost smell the grapes ripening on the vine as I did back in those days of long ago.”

Grapes needed to be picked at prime time, right after the first light frost, but not after a hard frost because then they would be ruined. Some days, anxious for harvest, I’d go pick a grape or two to see if they were ready, but honestly, I mostly knew when they were ready because I could smell when they were ripened.

Grapes, like all fruit cannot be harvested until the time is right.

As I anxiously waited for the fruition of medical treatment updates on my son-in-law, and as I prayed for my daughter as she faithfully slept in the hospital by her husband’s side for all of those eighty-five nights, I reminded myself that healing takes time too.

The harvest of hope or healing, for restoration, is not accomplished on my timeline.

Thinking of those grape harvests and juice I made for my family, a metaphor came to my mind:

The harvested grapes had to heated and crushed to make wonderful, sweet tasting juice.

I don’t want this crushing for those I love! Don’t give me that metaphor! I know its true, but I do not like it. I do not like my loved ones to suffer any kind of crushing!

I only want smooth sailing, predictable, linear healing and restoration for my loved ones!

I want the fulfillment of that auspicious month I prayed for when September began.

Beth Moore has written an entire book about all she learned when she decided she wanted to have her very own vineyard. In Chasing Vines, she writes:

With GOD, nothing has a haphazard end, no matter how chaotic the means may seem.3

There have been times in the past month, the month of September, where I felt very challenged to hang on to hope for good outcomes for all my tribe has been going through.

Again, Beth Moore, or as many of you may call her, Aunty Beth, has good words on that topic. (Moore 105). 4

Making vines struggle generally results in better quality grapes. It’s a bit like people. Place someone in a near-perfect environment, giving them every comfort and all that they could ever want to satisfy their physical needs, and it could have rather disastrous consequences for the personality and physique. If you take a grapevine and make its physical requirements for water and nutrients easily accessible, then (somewhat counterintuitively) it will give you poor grapes.

September Setbacks and Progress

Healing is never linear. At the end of of the first week in September, just after my last post, Amy wrote these words on Jewett’s CaringBridge:

“Whatever kind of ride we’re on, it’s got us hanging on for dear life!”

Hanging on for dear life is truly the story here! Jewett’s doctor, and Amy’s, the one who did her liver transplant and kidney transplant just one year ago, said, “Jewett has nine lives.” He really does after all he has overcome.

His medical history, his story, is his to tell someday, if he so chooses. The part that my daughter Amy played in that story is also hers to tell someday, if she so chooses.

My part as mom to these stories is my story, and all I can say at this point in the story is I have held on to hope, and I have prayed, and I have tried to honor the role I have as a support person on the margins looking in without stepping over of the boundary I sensed was in place by giving advice, unless I was asked. I mostly tried to stay calm. I tried not to panic when I didn’t get an update for days at a time. I’d just keep reminding myself of the words she firmly spoke to me a few times: Mom, no news means I have no news.

In other words, I tried not to add to my daughter’s stress by letting my own anxious worries for her and for her husband become too annoying. Remember, don’t PUSH.

Years ago a friend of mine gave me a magnet with advice about how to PUSH with your adult children:

Pray Until Something Happens

That is what I have tried to do. That is what I continue to try to do.

As September Ends…

Finally, we have good news! As the month of September drew to an end, the fortuitous, auspicious outcome I hoped for was on the horizon. We don’t have all the details, but word has it that Jewett will soon be released from the hospital.

Read about it here in Amy’s own words:

September 30, 2025

I honestly feel so bad when I don’t update you all. After all, you have been a tremendous support since day one. You’ve sent kind messages, you prayed, you’ve visited, you’ve donated….. the list goes on and on. In a time of despair, you all have been cheering Jewett on. I don’t think we will ever be able to truly convey just how much we appreciate it all.

I honestly don’t have much to update……again. Jewett is improving with everyday. He is so determined! Where it stands now, he will be discharged to inpatient rehab any day. However, that can’t happen until he has a chair at a dialysis clinic waiting for him when he is discharged home. Lots of moving parts! When he is moved, this will be his fifth or sixth room. And I think his fourth floor change. Don’t quote me on that. It’s been hard to keep track of!

Him coming home is so so so close!! It truly is remarkable. Someday I will sit with him and explain everything that he has overcome. He obviously is aware of the big things, you know like receiving TWO liver transplants, but as of right now he has said he isn’t ready for that. I don’t think anyone could blame him.

I have a little secret for you all. As my updates draw to an end, Jewett has said that he wants to do the update when he gets home. 😊

Stay tuned! The best is yet to come.

Amy

The month ended on an auspicious note!

So folks, stay tuned! As Amy said, “The best is yet to come.”

Thank you to all who have generously contributed towards the medical expenses for Jewett as he continues to be in the ICU. As I mentioned in my last post, they are having to COBRA their medical insurance because Jewett had just left his old job when he became ill and was set to begin a new job on July 14. A GoFundMe account has been established to help Amy and Jewett with their medical expenses. I have provided a link to that account.

Also, from now until the end of 2025, money from all new paid subscriptions to Strands of Silver will be go to help cover COBRA and other medical expenses for Amy and Jewett. I have already been able to donate money from paid subscriptions for this newsletter to Amy and Jewett! Thank you again for supporting me and my work AND Amy and Jewett by becoming a paid subscriber.

I have tried to be that mom that does not rob my children of their own ability to take care of the trials they are going through while also offering resources that I can provide if they feel they can accept them.

I try to have answers IF they ask questions, but honestly, I don’t have answers much of the time. And I have realized the questions I hear from my children are often rhetorical or just expressions of their own confusion, and in that confusion, they don’t want me to answer, they just want me to hear their dilemmas as they sort through options.

I certainly don’t have fixes, though I wish I did, and I am determined, unsuccessfully much of time, not to spin my wheels trying to fix things. I know for certain, the last thing my kids want is for me to fix them. They aren’t broken. They just want a mom that listens and is supportive.

Don’t all of us just want to be heard when we struggle with problems we never thought we would encounter?

We don’t want someone’s trite euphemisms, nor do we want their vapid, canned, insipid responses that try to assure us everything will be ok.

We just want to be heard.

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We want others to see our pain, our sense of confusion, our worry about what to do next, but we do not want pity.

What we really want during the hard times is for someone to enter into our pain without looking away.

Henri Nouwen says it best:

The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing, and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.

Parenting is truly and exercise in accepting our powerlessness.

Friends, being a mom is so very often an exercise is facing the reality of our own powerlessness. This is especially true when we are parents of adult children.

If there is anything I have learned in the past few years, it is essentially that I am powerless to fix all that I wish I could fix when it comes to all that my dear children have had to deal with in their adult lives.

In March and April of 2024, as my daughter Amy was becoming increasingly ill and as it became ever more evident that she was going to need not just one transplant to save her life, but two, my most pressing questions became: how do I as a mom navigate such uncertainty? How have other moms handled this? How did they face such unknowing? How did they come to accept how little power they had to make their children well? How did they find the right role to play in the life as mom to a seriously ill, adult child who is married?

I’m not sure I ever found the answers to any these questions. Somehow, I just muddled along, taking my cues from my daughter herself, trying to listen for what she needed or wanted from me, or what she did not want. What she did not want was usually voiced quite clearly and firmly, and while I was often frustrated by her boundaries, I respected them and tried to keep my door open by keeping my ears and heart open and attuned as best I could to all she was saying (or not saying) to me during many uncertain days and months.

The inner work of another human being is a work only they can do.

By stepping out of the way, I was, over time, able to witness how my daughter’s illness was refining her in beautiful ways. I began to see her being more present in her life than I had seen her for many years as she took care of the flowers she was growing, sending me photos, and sometimes asking for gardening advice.

I was the one consumed with the unknown outcome for her illness, or so it seemed. She was simply living her life the best she could as she was in that liminal space of needing a kidney and a liver transplant yet not yet being sick enough to get one.

In accepting my powerlessness of being able to make everything better for an ill adult child, I was able to witness the resilience, the grace, and the wisdom she had to truly create beauty as she lived the life she had, not the one I would have given anything not to have her experience.

2025 - August gives way to September

The phone rang early on September 1, and I was still asleep when I peeked at my phone and saw the call was from my daughter Amy.1 “This can’t be good if she is calling right after rounds,” I thought as I reached for my phone. Sure enough, she was crying. Jewett’s condition had changed. He’d had a setback. Could I come up to her side?2

We were on day fifty-seven of his hospitalization, I think. I’ve lost track of time. We thought he was soon getting out of ICU. This setback was devastating.

I quickly threw together an overnight bag and made the seventy mile drive north to the Anshutz Medical Center in Denver. I know those streets, the parking lots, the paths around the hospital, and the hallways much too well, but on the first day of September, Labor Day, it all seemed a bit off. In fact the door I tried to enter was locked, which shocked me until I realized the door to the outpatient part of the hospital would be unused because it was a holiday.

I tried to prepare myself for the worst as I had not seen Jewett in over a month. As I walked into the main part of the hospital, I was grateful for the piano player in the lobby. “I wonder if he knows how comforting it is to hear him play beautiful music in places where people are dealing with such uncertainty, such trauma, such worry.

Respecting my daughter’s privacy and her husband’s, I don’t take photos of them as they deal with illness and frailty, but this day, I wanted a photo to bear witness to the strength and the constancy of my daughter as she has stayed by her husband’s side advocating for him and his care.

Not long after I got to the hospital, we headed to the cafeteria so Amy could get some food. We then went outside to the plaza so she could eat. She filled me in on all the latest medical updates as she ate.

Amy needed to go home for a few things, so I went with her. She lives another 50 minutes north of the hospital. I had not been to her house since Mother’s Day Weekend when I had arrived at her home in time to see her sitting on her steps surrounding by plants and pots as she set out to plant her summer garden, her happy place.

I’d helped a little and gave my two cents worth on what to plant where. We’d gone to a street fair the next day, and I captured a photo of Amy, her husband, and mine companionably chatting as they rested in the shade as we shopped.

It was just a perfect spring day. It all felt so wonderful. I wondered at the miracle of it all. There we all were out enjoying ourselves. Amy was well and thriving after her surgery. My beautiful girl was out living life again and doing it with such happiness. Never, never, never would I ever imagine what the summer would bring into their lives and into the lives of all who love them.

My girl hates to have her picture taken, but once we got to her house, I wanted a photo of her in her September garden, so I badgered her until she gave in.3

I asked if the zinnias had been planted this year or if they were from the seeds I so carefully tried to sow last fall right after her transplant as her sister and I went to her house to help get her mums and fall flowers planted. She wasn’t sure, but I want to think they are from the seeds I sowed from last year’s plantings.

Those seeds from last fall were seeds of hope that I sowed with hope for a blooming in the season to come.

Amy has spent this summer in the hospital where she has barely left her husband’s side, night or day, for these past two months.

As we toured my daughter’s summer garden, I found myself storing up each precious moment together.

I’d not expected to see her as we launched into September, and I certainly didn’t think I’d be able to visit her home when I left mine earlier that morning, but there I was in her garden marveling at the growth of the the squash. She pointed out the volunteer corn plants, and noted the impatiens I’d planted. I couldn’t get enough of seeing the zinnias, and the dahlias, and all the rest of her many plantings.

We even had a few moments of chatting over the back fence with the neighbor who has loved my daughter and her husband well by feeding her cat, and by watering, and mowing all that was growing throughout the summer. I prayed for Jewett as I saw how well his veggies were doing. How I wished he was there showing me his crops.

I photographed Amy as she told me how she needed to plant this and that in a new location next year. I didn’t get a close-up of her beautiful dahlias.

We had our rare and precious one on one mother/daughter time. What a gift that time always is to me.

We talked of the importance of entering the joys that life has to offer, even if for a few moments or hours, during times of difficulty, stress, and uncertainty.

A moment marveling at the beauty of a single flower blossom can be healing to mind needing to see something that brings joy.

I was grateful that as we drove and talked she made up her mind to leave the hospital for the night so she could go to a concert at Red Rocks where Gregory Alan Isakov would be performing. Her daughter had gifted her with tickets months ago.

Now as I reflect back on that day when the calendar was flipped from August to September, I remember the sinking feeling I felt when I heard Jewett had a setback.

I also remember the precious moments of being present with my daughter. We solved no problems that day, and the doctors did not come up with a miracle overnight cure for the many medical problems that Jewett continues to experience.

If anything, our powerlessness to change outcomes we want to change became a bit more pronounced that day. That is not what I am carrying with me as we head into the coming days.

I am remembering zinnias that are blooming in front of Amy and Jewett’s home. I am remembering they might have sprung from those seeds of hope I planted last fall. I am remembering their beauty, and the joy we both felt as we looked at their bright colors and unique shapes. I am remembering that while I myself am powerless to make a flower grow and bloom. I am also powerless to heal another when illness strikes.

I must trust in a power beyond myself.

I continue to pray.

That is all I’ve ever really been able to do for my children when I have felt powerless and had to face unknown outcomes as we have walked through days of uncertainty.

And so the walk down this path of uncertainty continues.

Thank you for every prayer said on behalf of Amy and her husband Jewett and for all of us. Keep them coming.

Thank you to all who have generously contributed towards the medical expenses for Jewett as he continues to be in the ICU. As I mentioned in my last post, they are having to COBRA their medical insurance because Jewett had just left his old job when he became ill and was set to begin a new job on July 14. A GoFundMe account has been established to help Amy and Jewett with their medical expenses. I have provided a link to that account.

Also, from now until the end of 2025, money from all new paid subscriptions to Strands of Silver will be go to help cover COBRA and other medical expenses for Amy and Jewett. I have already been able to donate money from paid subscriptions for this newsletter to Amy and Jewett! Thank you again for supporting me and my work AND Amy and Jewett by becoming a paid subscriber.

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She didn’t answer my question, she just said, “Mom, I’m going to tell you something, and I need you to listen and stay calm and not get upset.”

Those words spoken from a child to a parent surely signal that some sort of bad news is about to be delivered, but in my case, hearing those words caused me to instantly prepare myself for news of some unexpected setback in Amy’s health or well-being.

After all, she is a double transplant survivor. In September of 2024,1 after nine months of rapid decline in her health due to failing kidneys and a liver, Amy had been given the gift of life when she received both a liver and kidney transplant. Since that miraculous, life-saving surgery, she has thrived, but I guess know I’ll always worry that she could go into rejection of those organs that keep on giving her a new lease on life. I live with a dreaded sense that at any moment her life could again be at risk. Having almost lost her once, I live with a mix of deep, deep gratitude that she is alive, is astonishingly well, and is making plans for the future and also I live with a deep fear that it could all be snatched away from her in a moment.

“You Can’t Make This Stuff Up.”

That Saturday morning phone call in the first week of July of 2025, was not one to inform me that my daughter was ill or having a setback; it was to inform me that her husband Jewett had gone to the ER earlier in the day after days of what was thought to be a stomach virus, and was now showing signs of liver failure. He was being transported by ambulance to UCHealth - Anshutz in Denver, the same hospital where Amy had received both a kidney and a liver just ten month earlier.

Her words were hard to take in. She asked about my husband’s symptoms when he had hepatitis over twenty years ago, and when I told her about his illness, it confirmed the symptoms Jewett was showing. The blood work came back with liver numbers that were worse than Amy’s had ever been. The cause of his illness suspected to be hepatitis. The ER doctors were already suggesting he might need a liver transplant.

As Amy spoke to me, she said, “You can’t make this stuff up!”

Two days later, with a sense of urgency and a deep need to lay my own eyes on both Amy and Jewett so I could see how they were doing, I decided I needed to drive the sixty miles from my home to the hospital in Denver. Before I left, I wrote in my journal:

I’m trying to make sense of nonsense and how bizarre it is to know that as I write this Jewett is awaiting the inevitable: a liver transplant. His liver has no viability, so he waits for the ammonia levels to reach his brain; then he is placed on a transplant register - a national one - where he will be #1 and as soon as a liver is procured he will undergo a liver transplant.

My oldest daughter flew in from out of state that same day so she could be with her sister and with me. We knew the hospital terrain well. We’d been there before. Maybe I needed my oldest daughter, my fellow traveler of places we never thought we’d walk, to be with me more than even Amy needed her sister to be there. I needed a wingman to keep me calm. I just could not wrap my head around the fact that we were heading to the transplant floor again!2

Jewett received the hoped for liver and underwent liver transplant surgery on July 10. The excruciating wait for the only thing that would prolong his life was over. We thought we knew the drill. Amy’s health had been miraculously reversed with her transplant surgery, and she had gone home just days later.

Jewett and Amy celebrated their fourth wedding anniversary the next day, July 11. While it was not the dance party they had for their wedding, we all were overjoyed to know that the gift of life had again been given to our loved one through an organ donor.

Dashed Hopes

Five days after the transplant, Jewett was transferred from the transplant recovery floor back to the STICU (Surgical Trauma ICU) floor at Anshutz. Amy had called in the late afternoon and said she needed me to come to Denver to be with her. Jewett had suddenly become unresponsive. Since that day, I think we all have lost track of all the unbelievable (that word again!) medical crises Jewett has had.

In the past month, whenever Amy calls with updates, I say to her, “I hope you’re writing this all down.” She replies, “That’s what you are for.” My scrivener skills are not stellar. First of all, the complexities of all Jewett has been through medically are incomprehensible to me.

My head seems to be snapping repeatedly on this roller coaster ride, and I’m not the one in hospital bed, nor am I the one spending days and nights at the hospital as Amy did for nearly the entire month of July. I don’t think she left her husband’s side for a night at a hotel or at home more than three times since this entire ordeal began the first week in July.

More Unbelievable News

Unfortunately, the liver Jewett received on July 10, was discovered to be necrotic. There was nothing that could be done. He had to undergo another liver transplant in order to live. There is less than a 1% chance of this ever happening after a liver transplant. Suddenly, we found ourselves in the absolutely inconceivable place of praying a liver could be found to save a loved one’s life. Thankfully, on July 26th, Jewett again underwent a second liver transplant surgery.

He remains in the STICU at Anshutz. He has had many setbacks, and thankfully, he’s had wins along the way too. He also is doing very much better today than he was several weeks ago. We remain hopeful that he will make a full recovery.

Please join us in praying for him and for his recovery.

Amy writes on CaringBridge that Jewett is such an inspiration, and he is. He is strong and determined to fight. His doctor said it was his fight that has pulled him through. He has the most amazing team of doctors and specialists working on his behalf, and he has Amy by his side. I am in awe of her tenacity in advocating for him and in the resilience she has shown through all of this.

For some reason, this photo of Amy and Jewett has become one of my favorites. It captures their smiles, their sense of fun, their obvious sense of enjoying the life they have built together.

Jewett is one who strikes up a conversation with whomever he meets, and his smile lights up every room. He has stood by Amy’s side through all of her illness, taking her dialysis every day, staying with her and working at his job at the same time, and then he’d come home and make sure he cooked her healthy meals. He managed her meds, and he made sure anything she needed she had. He is the one at every family dinner cooking in the kitchen and making sure whatever other help we needed he provided. He has a loyal group of friends because he is that friend that others want to spend time with. He is a hard working and valued employee. He is greatly loved and respected by many, and now nurses all adore him too. He thanks them for every every kindness, great or small.

Timing…

All of this medical crisis happened just as Amy and Jewett were celebrating a new opportunity. If you can imagine the very worst time to get sick with a life threatening event, well then you can just look at what has happened to this couple who is beloved by many.

Jewett gave notice on his previous employment on July 1. He had accepted a new position with a new company. They were both so excited about this new opportunity. They had hoped to get away on a vacation before he was to begin the new job on July 15.

Instead, Jewett was hospitalized and ended up having not one organ transplant, but two!

Jewett and Amy lost medical care coverage on July 31. They now must COBRA3 their insurance coverage. You can imagine how expensive that is! And they have no income. Amy has not been able to work for the past few years because of her own illness and recovery from her double organ transplant.

A GoFundMe account has been established to help Amy and Jewett with their medical expenses. I have provided a link to that account.

Also, from now until the end of 2025, money from all new paid subscriptions to Strands of Silver will be go to help cover COBRA and other medical expenses for Amy and Jewett. Just one of Amy’s anti-rejection drugs costs $2200/month if she has to pay for it out of pocket! Yes, that is right! I will donate all money from paid subscriptions for this newsletter to cover Jewett and Amy’s medical expenses.

Did you know that each time you leave a heart on a post on Substack, you help that newsletter in discoverability? Here a small way you as readers can help writers on Substack: Like this post with a heart, or leave a comment.

Today, my friend wrote me saying life had sure been a roller coaster ride for me and my family this year, and she is right.1 The thing is, when you stand in line to get on a roller coaster, you know what you are in for. There will be ups, and there will be downs. With those ups and downs there is a thrill of anticipation over the excitement such a ride will bring.

I love roller coasters. I really do, or I used to love them when I was younger, but I’m not so sure my vestibular system could take them now that I am old woman.

What I don’t love is a life that feels like I am stuck on a bad roller coaster ride.

The head feels like it has been snapped way too many times by a downward turn at a fast rate of speed, and those quick turns when I don’t know what kind of a ride is coming around the next bend are making me anxious. There’s a pit of fear forming in my stomach as I wonder just how long this ride will last and if we all will be in one piece when it is all over.

Still, I persist.

I am taking life as it comes because I know of no other way to do it. I’ve learned as Buechner himself has said that the only way to take life as it comes is to also realize that along with the hard parts, the crazy parts that threaten to undo us, come those times when we are visited by a crazy, holy grace.2

Sometimes, you just need the grace of a simple Saturday morning…

Our new puppy yelped throughout the night and we didn’t get any sleep last night. That is unusual. We have had him nearly two months now, and he is four months old. He is still a handful as we are old and he is very young and full of a lot of energy when we, two octogenarians, have limited reserves of energy on any given day. Still, we are happy to have our dear Winston in our home even though he is so very, very different from our last dog, our beloved Boston.

Winston has added so much life to this house. We both comment often how we just really need a dog in our lives to make our home feel more alive, more interesting, and more fun.

And so, even though we had little sleep, we both were up early this morning to tend to the pup, and then after a nap in the recliner, my hubby said he’d go down to one of our favorite Saturday morning breakfast spots and pick up something for us to eat at home.

I decided I’d better walk Winston around block while his master was gone, but he wasn’t having it. He was tired and wanted to just sprawl out on the sidewalk to rest, so I cut through the back space behind our house to get home.

That is when I saw my first hummingbird of the season enjoying the zinnias I had planted in a pot on the west side of my house. I didn’t capture a photo of the hummingbird, but he made my day seem a bit more magical, and for that I was grateful.

I was loath to go inside when I saw how beautiful it was on the front patio once Winston and I got home from our abbreviated walk, so I sat down to write in my journal while sipping on another cup of coffee as I waited for Jim to return home.

Not wanting to lose the Saturday morning mid-July vibes, I snapped a few photos to remind myself of the essentiality of capturing moments that speak to me of beauty, of the comfort that companionship brings one’s life during the good times and the bad, and also, the importance of simply taking time for quiet reflection when we live in times that make us wonder what the future holds for our personal lives, or the lives of our loved ones.

July 2025

Last week, I snapped photos of my July garden, a garden I’ve often called my impossible garden because we have deer who love to munch on whatever I plant. Not only that, we have rocky soil, and we don’t have the easiest of growing seasons as we often have snow, hail, wind, and freezing temperatures late into the spring where I live in a valley at the foothills of the front range of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado.

I am not one to give up easily though when it comes to life and gardening, so I persist against the odds and keep on planting.

Deer don’t eat daisies, so I have let mine go wild. In July they put on quite a show. I love my garden in July, even as daisies try to grab hold of every piece of growing space I have in my very small garden area.

Whenever I return home in July, I always smile at the happy, joyful greeting I find in the daisies that line my driveway. There is just something about a daisy that I love.

Today, it is enough for me to also find joy and beauty and grace in the simple things that a Saturday morning has brought me. It has been a time when I could take a deep breath and relax. Tonight may bring a good news, or bad, but for a time this morning, I had a time a peace and time to renew hope. I had time to renew my strength so I can keep on going no matter what the future brings.

Today, I took this crazy, holy grace of a day to be so grateful for knowing I can take life as it comes because even though the past has at times been heavy I have survived, and so have my loved ones. There have been times when we worried we would not, could not possibly, survive the next storm, the next crisis, but we did.

In the remembering of it, the survival, we have found such grace to keep us going. We have not given up. We are survivors, and we have not survived any of this that we as a family have gone through alone. Many have lifted us in prayer. Many have ministered to our physical and financial needs. Many have loved us well.

Frederick Buechner asks, what does our surviving tell us?

It tells us that weak as we are, a strength beyond our strength has pulled us through at least this far, at least to this day.

Life really is best lived one day at a time.

Moment to moment.

Grace to grace.

This day, this Saturday, has been a day when I have remembered that grace continues to pull us through by some great miracle and in all those times I have never been alone. My heart has been fed by the love and prayers of others and by the beauty that is to be found in this world that seems at times to be so broken.

A child takes life as it comes because that child has faith and confidence in a strength outside of themselves. I continue to live trusting in the unfathomable, incomprehensible, not to be understood, but much to be trusted strength and provision that has always been there for me from my the God I came to trust as a young child. That, my friends, is how I have been able to ride this roller coaster ride of a life. God is faithful. I’ve often said I have times when I could not hold on to my hope, but hope held me. I’ve always been held by that crazy, holy grace, a strength far beyond my own.

On days like today, I am so grateful for the grace of simple Saturday morning. I pray for more and more grace to be visited upon me and the ones I love best, especially as they are going through such hard, hard times.

Sometimes we need borrowed prayers because we no longer know how to pray or what to pray because the time in the house of suffering has seemed too long. If you are there in that house of suffering, of unknowing, or in a time of trying to hold on to hope, of hoping hope holds you, of hoping for more of that crazy, holy grace to answer your prayers, I am praying this borrowed prayer for you and for those I love best, and for myself: 3

Please hold my family and myself in your prayers.

A friend once commented that when she saw me, she thought of the word gestalt.1 She said my hair, clothes, shoes, jewelry all presented a well thought out pattern of wholeness where each part coordinated with the others to create a integrated picture of a well-put-together woman.

Thanking her for her kind complement, ruefully, I thought to myself how I wished all parts of my life came together in such a holistic, balanced way.

Struck by the word she used to describe an aspect of my presentation to the world, I knew if it were true, it was because of my mother. She taught me how to dress, and expected I was always to appear totally put together in public despite what might be going on inside of me.

Mother taught me to see color, shades of color, shadows, texture, pattens of design. She did this as we picked out fabrics so she could make the clothes I wore all through my childhood and beyond.

She taught me style as she worked to style me into the image and person she wanted me to be.

At her core, she was an artist.

She taught me to see the way light and shadow gave more depth to the beautiful landscapes and mountainsides we marveled over as we traveled throughout our home state of Colorado. Do you see all those shades of green and blue on that mountainside? How many shades of green can you see in one tree? Which side is in the sun? Do you see the effect of its shadow on green below it?

Sadly, I never became the artist I know she hoped I would be, but I do I see the parts, pieces, shades, designs and textures, that go into creating a beautiful picture.

I am grateful she taught me to see with an artist’s eye.

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Nine years ago, we celebrated my mother’s 100th birthday with a grand party. The setting was her back yard, a place she had lovingly curated into a place of beauty in the nearly half century she had lived there.

It was the place where she once grew a vegetable garden that my father continually praised in letters to the family. More than that though, it was a place where her need to create beauty was given expression as she planted, weeded, and carefully curated an outdoor space where she could combine the colors and shapes of plants, some of which I never saw in anyone else’s gardens, like she was painting a picture. She perfectly blended the colors in her garden like an artist would on her art palette.

She had a green thumb and it showed both inside her home and out.

I suspect it was also a place where she worked out some of frustrations, disappointments, and sorrows of life that surely she felt inside but never expressed.

In a rare moment of vulnerability towards the end of her life, she told me that she survived on the chickens she raised who produced eggs and on what she grew in her garden the year I was born while my father was serving in World War II. Then she said, “I took out all my feelings on that garden.”

I’m envious of those who like my mother can paint images they see and render them as great representations of the original scene. I always saw her as more of an illustrator than a person who created original art filled with emotion. She seemed to lack the ability to speak or express any emotion, and thereby, expected the same from me.

From my earliest days, lacking art skills, not being able to draw anything beyond a stick figure, I never saw myself as creative, until I began to write. That is when I saw myself as one who creates.

I was recently struck by the truth I learned about myself when I heard describe herself recently in a workshop she led on creativity. I summed up what I heard her say by speaking these words into my phone:

I’m a visual thinker but a verbal processor.

I think in images, but I process both by speaking, and writing, yet as I write those words, I realize that I process what I’m thinking and feeling and trying to understand by using all the domains of language.

Sometimes images we share with the world are curated to send a message: everything here is picture perfect. Any the pieces and parts of imperfection that are swirling around that one perfectly curated image are hidden from view.

As every writer knows, narratives are often constructed to tell an incomplete story too, or one that purposely distorts the truth or does not tell the entire story.

Images pop up in my mind as I write memoir. As I process what the image brings up in my mind, I constantly remind myself: it is the task of the memoirist to always tell the truth.

My mother created beautiful spaces. Was all that was lived in those beautiful?

Surely her 100th birthday was celebrated in such a place of beauty, one she created, and one that encapsulated home to me. She was honored and celebrated as well she should have been, for what she had created that was good and worthy of acknowledgment. It was good to have happy memories remembered, recounted as her family came together, presenting as a whole to be seen as a unified picture as her life was drawing to a close.

It was not a completely true or whole picture that we all presented, however. There were so many unresolved issues swirling underneath the surface among all of us.

I have remembered and recounted how Mother loved her gardens. She loved her roses. She loved her cats which also grew to be great creatures upon which she showered a lot of love.

She loved her children as best she could.

I remember her as a mother who created a home that was clean, orderly, one which had decor that she often made herself as she crafted drapes, slipcovered furniture. The walls were covered with her artwork which was quite accomplished.

She made nearly all of the clothes we wore as children. My prom dresses looked as if they were purchased in a designer’s shop, but in truth she had designed them and made them herself. My school clothes were made of colorful fabrics with buttons that were arty and not just run of mill like those of my classmates. She even made me hats to match the coats she made when I was a toddler.

Who wouldn’t see her as a picture perfect mother? I was often envied by classmates who said they wished they had her as a mom.

It was she who would wound my curly hair around rag curlers to make them look like ringlets that were perfectly shaped when my hair was actually unruly and wild and did not hold to the shape she tried desperately to form. Like me, each stand of hair obstinately held to it’s true nature refusing to be tamed.

My hair was not like hers but was uniquely mine. In time, my hair was allowed free expression because my mother had no choice in the matter. As an individual, she never fully allowed me the same expression.

There were expectations of how I was to look, to act, to appear in public, and there were expectations about which I could express, and what I was to keep quiet about.

In time, I learned to adapt to her expectations of me, or rather, I buried those parts of me that she would not allow to be expressed.

I only showed to her and to the world that which I hoped she would finally praise.

Sadly, it never happened. I never received praise from her for losing myself, nor were those parts of myself praised that were finally and painfully expressed as being true and right to and for me.

It has taken my a lifetime, and it has taken walking a path of great grief in the past fifteen years over the loss of two of whom were my dearest: my precious adult daughter, and my darling youngest sister, to express the deep feeling of loss and regret that I held deep inside but never expressed.

When mother died at the age of nearly 104, I finally was able to realize there are many griefs that we carry that do not come from losing a person we loved, but they come from places in our own hearts and soul that have been untouched by the love we sought, that we longed for, but that was denied to us through no fault of our own.

My mother loved me as best she could. She had no capacity to return the love a child has for a mother, nor was she able to give the love a daughter needed. A dear friend whose mother was much like mine once told me how her sister had recounted to her how her mother could be viewed and thereby understood2

It is like our mother had no arms. It was like we were children who desperately needed arms to reach out and hold us and shelter us and give us love back, but our mother could not do that because she had no arms.

In his book The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief, Francis Weller writes of this kind of grief found in places that have not known love, where in time we begin to see ourselves as having parts of ourselves that we must deny exist so we protect them from being seen as needy places, places outside of the circle of worth.3

Grief work is soul work.

Grief work reminds us that the soul deep within us is still alive and cries out to our very being that it needs attention. Parts of our souls have been neglected for a multitude of reasons, but they longs to live and not die a premature death.

Our souls want us to live fully while we still have any breath left in us.

We all grieve in different ways, but for us to truly mourn in such a way as to bring healing, we need to do so with others, in communities that hold space for our most painful stories.4

By writing, I hope to bring grief into the light, and I do so hoping that I am bringing my most agonizing losses into a community were others can say, Yes, I too have had that kind of loss. Yes, I know of that kind of pain. Let me wrap my arms around you. Let me walk beside in through this valley where you feel alone. You are not alone. 5

By sharing these listening to others, I hope to help them find healing also.

Sadly, I think of my mother and think how I could blame her for not having arms that I needed to hold me, to give me the love I needed. Instead I think of her artist hands, the ones she used to create gardens and beautiful clothes and paint wonderful landscapes, the hands I saw just before her death smoothing out the fabric of the blanket covering her, taking out the wrinkles, smoothing it she were about to make a fine seam as I often saw her do at her sewing machine.

I remember her beauty and the beauty she created and do not wish to blame her for what she could not give. I grieve the loss, forgive for her and for what never was, and hope my children extend the same grace to me in all the ways I failed them also.

I take comfort in the words penned by Francis Weller:

While many of us suffered mightily because of unconscious parenting, we must remember that our parents were participants in a society that failed to offer them what they needed in order to become solid individuals and good parents.

As I age, I finally try to make sense of the juxtaposition of light and darkness in all parts of my life and find the parts align more and more to create the unified whole of my life when I represent them honestly. I am finally feeling more free to live and to write with an authentic voice.

“The rest of this essay, part memoir and part op ed, will be posted later this week.”

I’m truly embarrassed not to have posted Part II to “Walk in Love” and hope you will forgive me for my lack of follow-through.

Part II is written, but it still needs some revision work, and quite frankly, I have not been up to getting that kind of editing and revising done. Stay tuned. I hope to have it polished up into presentable form soon.

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The end of May is never easy for me. It brings reminders of the most devastating day of my life when fifteen years ago, on the Friday of Memorial Day Weekend, my youngest daughter died by suicide. The grief I experience during this time has changed over the years. I find that on this particular weekend I don’t just revisit the loss of my beautiful daughter, but find great comfort in remembering her anew for all the beautiful memories she left me with during the time in this life that we shared.

My children also carry their own weight of grief whenever the death anniversary date of their sister approaches, and on the subsequent days after it, in their own ways. Over the years, I think I’m accurate when I say, we have all learned an important thing about grief: It is easier when we share our grief with each other. In other words, we have learned the distinction between grief and mourning.1

As A Family We Share A Special Bond - That of Being Survivors of Suicide Loss

This special bond is not one we would ever have wanted to have in our lives, but we have it nonetheless. We have walked this long path of loss together. We walk the path differently, but we all know we have been and will continue to be there for each other along the path. There is great comfort in knowing this.

Survivors share a special bond that is based on trust, not secrecy or shame. 2

Memorial Day Weekend

This year my oldest daughter Keicha3 visited from out of state for the long Memorial Day Weekend. She often visits during this particular weekend which also marks the anniversary date of her sister’s death, as way of being together so we can support each other during a time that is hard for us all. She wants to be with family, and I, as a mom, love having my family around me during these hard days.

I was ill with a bad sinus infection the entire time she was here. Let’s just say, I was not best hostess for the visit, but that did not seem to matter because the time together still provided a great balm for my soul. Hopefully, it did for her too.

On the first morning after my daughter’s late evening arrival the night before, I woke up late. See what I mean about not being a great hostess, but it didn’t seem to matter to my daughter and her partner Steve. They appeared to be quite happy to have been left alone during the best morning hours because that allowed these two bookworms to curl up with each other and their books on my couch. By the time I got up, they had made the coffee and were absorbed in their current reading material.

I said to my houseguests, “We’re boring and slow around here,” but our visitors seemed to like our pace. A slow pace, and rainy weather meant the visit allowed for lots of long talks and lots of quiet reading time.

I’ll always remember the beauty these peonies I picked up from Trader Joe’s added to the ambiance of my living room as we sat companionably together remembering happy times as a family and speaking of those sad times too.4 Other times we talked about life as it is for us now, or we shared tidbits about the news or our thoughts on all kinds of matters.

Unfortunately, because I was sick with a sinus infection I didn’t feel up to leaving the house. When my daughter and her partner got tired of living at our pace, they were their own when it came to entertainment and recreation. They seemed to be ok with that. They went hiking with my youngest son, spent time exploring places around Colorado Springs that were new to Steve, and were able to have a lunch date with two of Keicha’s cousins.

My oldest daughter and I often joke about both having “oldest daughter syndrome” which involves directing others in the household on how things are going to go. During this visit, she had plenty of opportunities to practice her skills by directing me on things like: “You’re sick. Stop looking after us.” Or, “Go take a bath mom, we can do the dishes.” And she organized a few things around here too. She’s a great organizer. I am not. I always said the first words out of her mouth when she was born were, “I hope I live so I can get my mom organized.”

Keicha also was on a time crunch while she was here because she wanted to finish reading my autographed copy of You Could Make This Place Beautiful 5by Maggie Smith that I picked up at Ann Patchett’s bookstore called Parnassus while I was in Nashville in April.6As Keicha would read, she’d stop at times and read me a passage aloud, but what I will remember most is when she said, Mom, sometimes I feel like weeping over the beauty of the way Maggie Smith uses language.

I agree with her on that.

The sinus infection I had lingered on after the visit from my daughter was over, and while I did get a lot of reading done during the end of May and beginning of June, I just did not ever feel up to working on any type of serious writing, nor did I feel good enough to dash off a quick newsletter.

After My Daughter’s Visit, We Got A New Puppy!

I’m so excited to introduce you all to Winston. He is tiny little bundle of joy and energy that has completely changed our quiet, slow-paced lives around here. We’ve always had golden retrievers in our lives, and lost our dearly loved Boston last May. As we talked of getting a new dog over the past year, we decided since we are both in our 80’s we would go with a smaller breed.

We did some research and chose a breeder in northern Colorado who breeds shichons. We think he will be the perfect dog for us, and so far, despite the worry he caused the first day when he would not eat or drink, and despite the first three nights of lack of sleep as he adjusted to us and his kennel, we have been extremely happy with our new addition to our family.

Snippets from Sally

What I’ve Been Reading in May and June:

• The Book of Alchemy by Suleika Jaouad which was a Mother’s Day gift from my daughter Amy. I read one entry from this book per day just before I journal in the morning. This is a new practice for me. I don’t generally use writing prompts when I journal, but I’ve enjoyed responding to some of these.

• Encore: A Journal of the Eightieth Year by May Sarton. I love May Sarton and read many of her books. I read this book some evenings when I don’t want to watch television. It has been interesting to read how her life was the year she turned eighty and compare what she writes to my own experience since I turned eighty in February. I will refer to some of thoughts on how her experience has been different from mine this in a later post.

• Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships, the 3rd Edition by Janja Lalich. I’m reading this book as a research reference as I work on my memoir about my own cult experience. I’ve been doing a deep dive with this book making notes along the way and reflecting in my journal on some of the responses that reading the book has brought up for me. It is an excellent resource, and it is well researched and well written.

• Inside Out: A Memoir of Entering Into and Breaking Out of a Minneapolis Political Cult, by Alexandra Stein. This is a fascinating memoir that I learned about when I was listening to a podcast which I will reference below.7

• March: A Novel by Geraldine Brooks. This book was a winner of the Pulitzer Prize and is the fictionalized story of the father the four sisters in Little Women which was written by Louisa May Alcott. If you have read the classic book, you will recall their father is off at war as the story unfolds. Some have called the book historical fiction because the timeframe for the novel is the Civil War. I enjoyed reading the book, but did not love it. I guess I would give it 3.5 stars. I also read Marmee, a Novel of Little Women by Sarah Miller a few years ago and really did enjoy that book, so I was disappointed in March as it did not live up to my expectations based on how much I enjoyed reading Marmee.

• Strangers in Time: A World War II Novel by David Baldacci. My husband and I share a Kindle account. We read completely different genres, so it is rare that either one of us read a book the other has read. I had just finished reading March and didn’t have another novel or memoir to read, so he recommended this Baldacci book. I am about a third of the way into it and am really enjoying the novel. I love anything written about WWII, but it is fun to read a historical fiction novel that also has a bit of mystery to it. It is hard for me to keep from reading this one late into the night.

Also this summer:

I am participating in ’s 1000 Words of Summer. While I have not been writing on Substack because of visitors, illness, brain fog from illness, and new puppy, I have managed to write at least 1,000 words in my journal every morning. Most mornings I write five full pages. Much of this memoir work as I am sorting through some things I want to focus on. I hope to get some solid chapters written on my memoir this summer as that IS my goal project for this summer.

Thanks for reading!

❌⭕️

Sally

6

I did get to visit Ann Patchett’s bookstore where I heard Maggie Smith talk about her new book, Dear Writer. while I was Nashville in April. It was truly a highlight of the trip! You can bet I picked up several autographed books while I was there.

The Backstory

I’d not read the book, nor had the film Out of Africa yet been made, but picture, if you can Robert Redford as Denys Finch Hatton and you will perhaps know why I was smitten by the one I will write about in the next paragraph.

Later, I fell in love with his charisma, his smile, his twinkling blue eyes, but what I noticed first as I walked in that parking lot surrounding the IRS building in Ogden, Utah was not just his brash swagger, but the outfit he wore as he strode to his car. Clad in an authentic South African safari bush jacket with an African leather bush hat to complete the look, this guy had a way of dressing that screamed, I’m the adventurous type.”

I wanted to know more about this guy to notice me, to ask me out on a date. I want to be a part of his orbit, and make him a part of mine. No one else in all the guys I’d ever had a crush on, or ever had caught my eye during my college days in Colorado, dressed like this, walked like this. I didn’t see his stride as being one of arrogance, nor did I see his dress as some sort of ostentatious pretense.

I might have missed some clues that I later discovered were character traits I did not wish for in a lifetime partner, but at the time, I was a not quite yet twenty-one year old young woman who in my naiveté was just looking for some guy to date who checked all the boxes I was looking for as a dream boat of guy I imagined would sweep me off my feet.

Several days later when we both spoke for the first time, as he walked me to the bus stop after work before he headed to his car, I was all atwitter and could hardly wait to see him the next day at work.

Both of us were recently hired civil servants working for IRS. I had recently left college, and I learned he was a returned Mormon missionary who had just returned from his mission to South Africa. He’d spent two years there, and on his way back home had been able to tour Kruger National Park, had gone on a safari, and had purchased the bush jacket and hat as a wearable souvenir.

The walk in the parking lot led to another after work walk in the parking lot. An then another. Then, just a few days after that first walk, he wanted me to walk over in the lot to see his newly purchased car, a 63 1/2 Ford Galaxie, which was a pretty exciting looking car for a guy I also found exciting. He said he’d drop by some day to give me a ride if I’d give him my address. Smooth.

He did stop by. I went for a ride with some of the other girls we worked with, so that was not our first date, but I remember we argued about creationism on the drive with him believing in it and with me not believing in it.

That didn’t stop him from asking me for a date. One of our first dates, one he reminded me took place in that car, took place on my twenty-first birthday when we went to see The Sound of Music in Salt Lake City. Soon we were dating on the regular.

A gifted photographer, he’d taken many beautiful and intriguing photos of South Africa which he shared with me when he invited me to his parents’ home for an evening of viewing his 35mm slides of South Africa which he projected on a screen. His narration not only told of his love of the country, it’s stunning beauty which he captured with a photographer’s eye, but also he spoke of his stance on apartheid.

I began to learn more about what it was like to be in that country in those years between 1963 and 1965, when apartheid practiced. In order to serve his mission in that land of South Africa, he had learned Afrikaans. His mission president identified as an Afrikaner. As a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, he was only allowed to proselytize among the white population.

All of this was new territory for me. My naiveté about what was happening in other parts of the world when it came to race relations was stunning in a time when in my own country the battle for civil rights was expanding as a movement not just in the south of the United States, but in the north.

We talked about civil rights for the blacks and about all he had seen in South Africa and had been unable to fully document because taking photos of the living conditions of the blacks working at a fancy hotel in Johannesburg had once gotten him in trouble with threats of having his camera taken and destroyed.

Soon, I was invited into his parents’ home for another Sunday evening, not for a slide show presentation about South Africa, but instead, so the missionaries from the LDS Church could give me an inquiry lesson.

I was not interested in inquiring about the LDS Church, but I was interested in this guy who had served as a missionary to South Africa for the LDS Church. Thus I began my indoctrination process that resulted in me joining the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

All of that happened fifty-nine years ago.

Making Sense of the Backstory

I still try to make sense of it all: the man, the courtship, the marriage, the joining of a religion I later saw as a cult and one I left as the marriage was falling apart as were were going through a bitter divorce.

I’m still trying to take all the fragments of that complex story and shape them into a memoir that makes sense to me and to others who might wish to read my story.

The story is one of trying to find my way back to myself, my true and authentic self, but also it is one of a faith walk that represents what that young girl all those years ago was really looking for when she joined and married into a religion that later she would know for sure did not represent at all what she really believed in.

My Faith Journey Beginnings

My faith journey began as a child, but it has taken many twists and turns as I have found my way towards a place that I recognized as the path where I could truly follow the Jesus whom I sensed was holding me as a lamb in his arms when I first was taught the words to those songs I learned in Sunday school as a preschooler in the old United Presbyterian Church in Colorado Springs. “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” That was the anthem of my childhood even when I did not always feel that love at home.

In the late 1940’s when I was taught the words, “Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world, red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight, Jesus loves the little children of the world,” I believed those words, and still do, though in todays culture such terms to describe racial groups would not be acceptable, I am quite certain.

As a young woman, just into my twenties, after I became engaged to that LDS missionary just back from serving a mission in South Africa, I entered into the Salt Lake Temple to make marriage vows. I left there asking myself, “Where was Jesus in all of that?”

I did not yet know the same year, 1966, when I joined the LDS Church and married a returned missionary, that Apostle Bruce R. McConkie in the book “Mormon Doctrine” wrote:

"Negroes in this life are denied the Priesthood; under no circumstances can they hold this delegation of authority from the Almighty. (Abraham 1:20-27.) The gospel message of salvation is not carried affirmatively to them... Negroes are not equal with other races where the receipt of certain spiritual blessings are concerned, particularly the priesthood and the temple blessings that flow there from, but this inequality is not of man's origin. It is the Lord's doing, is based on his eternal laws of justice, and grows out of the lack of Spiritual valiance of those concerned in their first estate." 1

When I did learn about the teachings on Blacks within the Mormon Church, I was already a member, and it became a point of disconnect between me and the church I had joined, but not one that I chose to leave the church over, to my shame.

Of course, leaving this religion, or cult as I now see it, over this point would have been very complex given my level of buy-in and involvement. After all, I was married, about to have my first child, and had fully committed myself to the marriage, the religion, and its prescribed way of life. It was easy to dismiss such points of disconnect when I was happy in so many other areas of my life.

When I finally left the Mormon Church in the early 1980’s, I did so because I could no longer align myself with many of the doctrines and teaching of that church. All of that is a story that takes many chapters to tell.

It would take many more chapters to tell you have the path that led me to where I am in my faith walk today.

South Africa is in the news this week, and so is the church to which I now belong.

If life can be distilled down to one moment in time when all the factors that have made up a life come together to give clarity about what I truly believe and am willing take a stand on, it is the stand for Christ and His teachings that Most Rev. Sean W. Rowe, presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, took this week. He took this stand by sending a letter to members of his church, the church to which I now belong, and I could not agree more with his stance and reasons for which he took that stand.

If you have not read the letter written by Bishop Rowe, I encourage you to do so. The link to it is posted in the footnotes.2

~ To be continued…

The rest of this essay, part memoir and part op ed, will be posted later this week. If you enjoyed reading this part, please leave a ❤️ after reading. It helps others find my writing. Thank you for reading. If you would like to read more of my writing please consider becoming a subscriber. A special thank you goes to my paid subscribers. Your support and encouragement means so much to me as I continue to write here on Substack and as I work my memoir.

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