Tag Archives: death

Protecting My Heart From Love

When you have a relationship with a person who is not reliable you cannot let yourself fall in Love with a capital L. There are caring feelings and lots of fun but protecting your heart from the inevitable break has to part of the plan for the relationship. The big loves of my life have all been precarious. I knew going into them that there was danger. The test is to let someone into your inner family circle and be proud of your relationship. If that is not possible society says you should ditch them.

Continue reading

4 Comments

Filed under Growth, Healing, Heart, Love, relationships

I Wrote This Because You Loved Me

The hour after my sister died I found myself asleep in a hospital chair dreaming of a wall sized art painting that featured ugly trolls holding crow marionettes.  It was an awful painting and I had no idea why I was there. Right below the painting two lines of words were written on the wall:

Joy in Life
Joy in Death

Now what was that supposed to mean, I asked myself. There might be some joy in life but is there really joy in death?  There was no doubt in my mind that I had experienced a lot of tragedy through my life. From the minute I was born, to this particular moment in time, death has always seemed to stalk me. It seems to challenge me at every moment and creates a permanent sadness deep in my soul.  I had seen so many people die in front of me that others felt I knew the final secrets just by looking at me and they would ask:

What do you do when someone dies?”

“What do you say to those that survive?”

I knew I could not stop life or death so I would silently ponder and say to them quietly:

“Joy in life”
“Joy in death”

Continue reading

10 Comments

Filed under Healing, Inspirational, Journal, Love

Abusive Relationships: Leave Before You Leave in a Bodybag


I think Adele’s video, “Set Fire to the Rain,” is a great example of a typical abusive relationship. It is actually difficult for me to watch, but I like this song… It does a very good job depicting the typical dynamics, the physical abuse, the screaming, punching, pushing, but what’s even more important is that it depicts the “making up.” The “making up” part of an abusive relationship is by far the sickest facet of the entire dynamic. In fact it is so painful to be without this person, the very person who causes the pain because, consequently, they’re also the only one who can make it go away- now that’s what I call a dilemna. Try putting up with this awful cycle for months and even years and tell me how your health is faring- non-existent I would say. If they don’t kill you,there’s a good chance you will kill yourself on purpose or by accident. 1 in every 5 female murder victims in the US are first victims of domestic violence.

Continue reading

3 Comments

Filed under Dating, Domestic Violence, Healing, Heart, Life Lessons

We’re All Just Trying to Go Home

The Beach Boy’s “Let’s Me Go Home,” Clapton’s “Blind Faith,” Denver’s “Take Me Home Country Roads,” and countless other ballads sing about going home. These rock songs keenly capture the sense of longing through their message, while many other Gospel songs on the same topic refer entirely to death. I think anytime I feel like I am in a rut or even just having a bad day I get this sense of wanting to go back in time, to revert to a place that gives me more comfort than the the world, the environment I call my home today.

Some of the places we long for aren’t places. Some of them are times, and some of them never even existed. Will a spurned child ever have a mother who loves them? Probably not, but they still hope for one, and spend their whole lives wondering why she hated them; why they were never good enough. They will spend their whole life trying to find the gift of unconditional love; a package that never arrived. They bumble, and tumble and fail and fall until one day, if they are lucky, they might realize that the unconditional love they seek must come from within and can’t be gotten from another person. Not exactly what they wanted. It doesn’t replace the love they missed out on from their mother. No one ever gets over something like that.

Continue reading

Comments Off on We’re All Just Trying to Go Home

Filed under Life Lessons

Don’t Fear the Reaper?

grim_reaper

Does the mid afternoon sunshine cause you to pause and reflect as you watch the particles of dust before you float around in the sun’s rays? I can remember how it suspended my thoughts to this higher consciousness since I was around five years old. I specifically recall one event. My aunt and grandmother would sometimes take me on day trips, often to Stockbridge, Massachusetts. On the drive home, one particular trip, I distinctly remember thinking as the sun shined through the car window and into my face, this is all going to pass before you so quickly and will be gone faster than you can imagine. Then I remember feeling sick to my stomach, that sinking feeling that sometimes lies in truths.

In retrospect, that’s pretty deep for a five-year-old. I knew then that life was fleeting, and that one day I’d be all grown up and that one day my grandmother would die, and that one day everyone else would too. But in that moment, a time when I was far away from death or illness, it felt like death was something that happened to other people, not my relatives. I believed this half heartedly hoping it was true like how older children still believe in Santa Clause, well, kind of, but know he’s a mythI experienced this feeling of living in a realm of immortality until of course, the day I was woken up by an early morning phone call telling me that my grandmother had cancer, it was that day I could no longer ignore the imminence of death.

Even after she died, and I was in my early twenties, I felt the same sense of immortality. It wasn’t until I sprained my wrist, my first injury ever, that I began to realize how fragile my life was. And of course, there’s nothing like a brush with Death to make you realize how quickly a life could be taken. When I talk about Death, I am not talking about it in the verb form as inthe act of dying. I am literally talking about Death himself, The Grim Reaper.

Continue reading

5 Comments

Filed under Healing

Karma, Kinda

My grandmother drove a powder blue Monte Carlo. Whenever she drove anywhere, she was constantly approached by men and teenage boys who wanted to buy her car. She had no interest in selling it. She loved that car intensely and even said she wanted to be buried in it. I’d dismiss her idea as crazy, then quietly wonder  how wide of a hole they’d have to dig to do such a thing. I’d picture the grounds keeper sweating profusely as he dug. After half a day, he’d finally finished digging the hole, and  like a traffic cop, he signaled the others to lower it into the ground using a crane.

Continue reading

1 Comment

Filed under Fun, Healing, Inspirational, Life Lessons