Widows who’ve gone before guide the inexperienced, scattering like bread crumbs, stories of what it’s like a little farther along.

And you think, “Please, God, no!”. Because you want it over with and you want it to become forgotten, aside from the faintest outline. Like the pain of childbirth. Or getting your appendix out.

But the experienced sojourners call back to you saying, “I’m sorry, but you can’t outrun it. . .”

And you say, “Damn you! I’ll do it differently. I’ll outrun it if it’s the last thing I do. I defy tears to wet my cheeks two, or three, or ten years from now!” You shake your fist.

They say, “The tears will still come. You can’t avoid them.”

Others say, “But you will have the memories.”

And you think, “Memories?! What fresh hell is this? What business do memories have trying to replace flesh & bones and the butterflies of a constantly renewing love? These ethereal memories, an acceptable consolation prize?”

And this thought experiment ends here.

Because all you have is 208 days of lost innocence and a compulsion for the void to simply disappear, coupled with the simultaneous disbelief and horror at the suggestion that memories could some day fill this void.

~ ps denim

With accompaniment from My Unapologetic Playlist:

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Dear reader: When we interact, we get an instant passport to travel the world through each other’s eyes—whether wading through grief, exploring equity, trying on theology, navigating the modern dating world, pressing into parenthood, or taking some other deeply human journey. What we all have in common is that we need each other.

The great thing about digital treks is that here, what you pack in, you don’t have to pack out. You’re encouraged to leave something behind. That’s what builds community.

See the cute little ❤️ below? Clicking it makes me feel like you picked up a souvenir just for me. If you unpack your thoughts in a comment, or give this a Restack, I’d be even more delighted! You can also follow me on Notes (I’ll follow you back) and we can keep exploring together.

Sicily. married a man from Sicily. Some years later, her Saro died of cancer, leaving Tembi behind with their 7-year-old daughter. Relatable.

At Christmas, my sister-in-law handed me Locke’s memoir, her book club’s recent crush, tearfully relaying how she’s heartbroken about what’s happened to us. My voice trembled, as I thanked her with slightly raised eyebrows as if to say, “We’ve got this much in common. . . We’re all bewildered at life’s apparent brutality. What is there, though, but surrender?”

Traversing the chapters, I dropped myself into Tembi’s shoes, partially in an attempt to relive our hours—Robben’s and mine —in Florence, Civita di Bagnoregio, Cinque Terre, and Sicily; partially because Saro’sgently relentless pursuit of Tembi takes me back to 2004 and the blue expanse of the ocean; and partially, I immersed myself into her story because it is my story. Once your worst nightmare befalls you, sanity’s distance from vicarious trauma no longer applies. Other readers may take it in with a mix of distance’s pity and fear’s superstition—bracing for that hijacking limbo between reading on and throwing out the book. “One wrong move,” threatens the hot breath at your ear and the cold slice of steel at your neck, “and you’ll regret it!” When you find yourself reading someone else’s story from behind the shield of your hand, you know you better be careful or you’ll invite the story to seep into your life. At that moment, you’re a spectator more than a participant, and that’s how it should be. That’s how you hope fate keeps it.

But this time, I was a participant. So, I asked Siri to play Locke’s soundtrack, discovering new artists through Saro’s & Tembi’s ears. Tracing Google’s map of Florence to understand how far she rode her bike home at night. From my sofa, I visited Caffe dell’ Artista on Greenwich Avenue, ruffling through the swath of aspirational messages, confessions, and literary quotes left over time by patrons, trying to find the one she’d left that day they’d eloped: “I want to spend my life in love and companionship.” Not only could I not find the note, I couldn’t even find the café. Until Yelp told me the location was permanently closed. I read a review saying “Long live Caffe Dell’Artista. . . You were and will always be my favourite”. I’m tempted to leave the café its second posthumous 5-star review, admitting that I’d never been there, except through a paragraph in Tembi Locke's achingly beautiful book, From Scratch.1

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Now, Locke lands on Sicily with her daughter and her husband’s ashes in tow. They travel by car to his birthplace. And so, with Google Maps at my service, I centre Palermo and the northern area of the island. It’s like the technology grants me the time machine Robben so frequently fantasized about. Lost boys, superheroes, and time machines were his kryptonite. Suddenly, Google implodes as I’m transported to a time just before its appearance.

I’m holding the brand-new Garmin Nuvi GPS2 gifted to me by my early-adopter spouse and I’m walking away from the pier. Now I’m in a Sicilian courtyard in the historic centre of Palermo, and suddenly Robben’s beside me. The first time since that day in August. And my daughter is also beside me—on the floor of our lounge, creating the Lego fox I bought her for her recent 8^th birthday and spontaneously composing a song that I imagine to be entitled, “We’re Going to Be Okay”.

Tears are stinging my eyes and that familiar strangler is at my throat.

Robben’s ordering for us, glancing where the menu says Pizza al Taglio, “Two slices of Margherita Pizza, one Cannoli, and a slice of Cassata, per favore.” We dine together, enjoying the sun and the bustle all around.

We’ve finished, and we’re meandering through the narrow cobblestone streets.

Once again, now, we’re standing at the façade of the Teatro Massimo di Palermo. I haven’t been there in probably two decades. I hadn’t even remembered the place existed.

“Mom, look! Bet you didn’t think this fox could move his legs!”

“Wow! He’s so cute!” I offer, jolted back to the reality where I’ll never again sit on a café terrace holding hands with Robben, saline coastal breeze tantalizing my senses and drawing me across the table for a salted caramel kiss.

Scanning the virtual map on my iPhone, I have a faint recollection of a road trip from Palermo. But where did we go? It would have been a low season day when there weren’t many kids onboard, allowing us to trade off a late day shift and extend our time in port. But I can’t remember. None of Google’s well indexed places look familiar. None of the images uploaded by reviewers, nor those presented by Street View, relinquish that I’ve been there before feeling. I would have asked Robben, “Do you remember taking thatday trip from Palermo? Do you remember the intimate beach right next to the large concrete platform? That’s all I can remember about that day.” And he would have remembered. But I can’t.

Cefalu, You Shine!

Penned Feb 9, 2025 by Penny Sue Denim

Ah, Cefalu.

Thank you, Tembi! On page 103, Locke notes that her brother-in-law, Cosimo, worked as a traffic cop in Cefalu. The moment I read the name, I remember that it had been a magical day in Sicily for Robben and I. A magical road trip to a small seaside city boasting a stunning cathedral flanked by a bare granite mountain and skirted by the glowing blue expanse of the sea.

Mountain, Mediterranean, and memories. Cefalu, you shine!

The lost road trip—at least one of them—has been found.

~ ps denim

With accompaniment from My Unapologetic Playlist:

Listen to the official From Scratch Soundtrack on Spotify curated by Netflix

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A little note: If you’re reading my work, I want to connect with you. I love to “follow” those who are interacting with me. I receive a broad reflection of the world through so many perspectives. If you can, drop me a ❤️ here, or just on one of my “notes” somewhere so I can begin to see the world through your eyes.

When the person you love dies, you want the whole world to stop with them. And stand still for you.

I planned the funeral, spending an inordinate chunk of life insurance credit on catering to celebrate Robben’s South African heritage.

I had a grand stack of memorial cards printed. I wanted the whole world to attend his funeral, to miss him and feel the void of his absence like we did, to witness our devastation—a relatively young widow and her two young, fatherless children. I wanted everyone in attendance to raise and shake a collective fist at God, there in that church where several years of my devotion to Him had been expressed.

I stopped short of hiring a moirologist, however, though overall I think he deserved a public spectacle.

The girls and I, as I recall, were dry-eyed, sitting dutifully in the front pew—or was it the second? I don’t quite remember. Dutifully, not in any sense to the people in the sanctuary—I wasn’t overly concerned with us meeting their expectations, whatever those might have been. But rather, we were fulfilling a duty to the universe, to our omnipotent God, who had decided that this was how we would be spending that Saturday morning in September.

Why am I writing this piece tonight? Well, in my thus-far failed commitment to experiment with prayer through grief,—and lying here aimlessly, suddenly wide awake thanks to the jarring and haunting yowls of our kitten in her first heat cycle—I feel the drag of a thousand temptations against that commitment to bring my grief to God in prayer.

I yearn to click into social media and interact with people there. I want to go back to sleep. I’ve got a hankering to hop out of bed and prepare a five-course meal—even though I hate cooking. Anything to distract from what I’m “supposed” to be doing: identifying what to pray for through a heartfelt inventory of all the pains the world is inflicting on me—and those I love—right now.

The resistance to metabolizing actual grief is powerful. I think I’ll do what I do best: intellectualize and projectivize it.

I become curious about those people on the far side of the pendulum. If I am one who desires to reject domestic grief, then I wonder what it is like to have foreign grief routinely inhabit one’s body. If I crave disassociation from my legitimate grief, what is it like to associate with grief that is not one’s own?

I google “life of a professional mourner”.

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So. I’ve avoided feeling my feelings and calling out to God like a psalmist. Instead, I’m busy writing for my audience.

But it’s okay; I’ve delegated the role of moirologist to the little black kitten since she’s doing such a great job of midnight wailing anyways.

Now, I’ll allow myself to hop on social media and review my audience growth.

Oh, but I better finish praying first:

Dear God,

You’re great. I’ve sinned. Thanks for being great. I need a lot of stuff, and I want even more.

Amen.

In some aeon of time and timelessness, I bet God’s heard that generic prayer a time or two. But I don’t care. I’m not willing to expose myself to Him in heartbreak. So, at least—out of boredom—one of us is nodding off tonight.

~ ps denim

With accompaniment from My Unapologetic Playlist:

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Love cats? Check out my short story The Cat Portraits

Don’t love cats? That’s okay. It’s not really about cats.

We had another big fight just after our second daughter’s birth. This one is etched in my memory. I had arranged newborn portraits for our little family on her sixth or seventh day, having arrived home from the hospital tired and stitched up.

Like most couples cradling a newborn, we were joyous, exhausted, and overwhelmed all at once.

As an experienced world traveler and a gifted photographer who was more comfortable behind the camera than in front of it, Robben typically sloughed off formal family portraits in favour of selfies taken at meaningful landmarks. But he was willing to subject himself to family portraits with each of our newborns. Perhaps, also, he sensed a certain amount of vanity in those posed photos, the kind of vanity, in this digital age, that would arguably be more gratifying to a wife/ mother than to a husband/ father.

Relieved that he had agreed to these portraits when he wouldn’t even agree to the purchase of our older daughter’s kindergarten school photos, I had made the arrangements. Getting ready for bed the night before, something set us off. Like most of our fights, I couldn’t possibly tell you what it was. Not now. Not, probably, a week after the incident. The starting point rarely had any great significance. The middle section tended to involve hurling of accusations, defensiveness, raging, and an altogether awful job of listening on both our parts. The climax, this time, was his announcement that he wouldn’t be going to the family portraits in the morning.

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The final act of our disagreements typically involved me trying to whitewash the ways I had offended him during the fight. This time wasn’t much different. But, with the scheduled photography session quickly approaching, and several breastfeeding sessions “scheduled” in the interim, my efforts were more desperate than usual. After an excessive amount of tears, no doubt bolstered by the baby blues, I dove right into back-peddling, apologizing, and begging. In the end, he did attend those newborn portraits, which provided some of our most precious residual family images. But if you look real close into those two (or three or four) sets of eyes staring back at you, you’ll see reflections of resignation, dissatisfaction, and overall heartbreak. What you won’t see are traces of the puffy-eyed bathroom-mirror selfie I took the night before. If you were to compare those two images, taken less than twelve hours apart, you’d be mesmerized by the magic of make-up and the photoshopping skills of our expert photographer.

Not long after this, feeling lonely, rejected, and overtaxed, I took a step towards admitting what I had been sensing for years: that my husband wasn’t capable of emotional availability. And so, I bought a teddy bear: a brown Gund named Philbin. Philbin’s sole purpose was to comfort an aching soul. Although my husband rarely withheld physical affection, I somehow needed Philbin’s substitute embrace for all those moments when, feeling deeply misunderstood and completely depleted with my arms monopolized by a newborn, my heart was falling apart.

~ ps denim

With accompaniment from My Unapologetic Playlist:

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A little note: If you’re reading my work, I want to connect with you. I love to “follow” those who are interacting with me. I receive a broad reflection of the world through so many perspectives. If you can, drop me a ❤️ here, or just on one of my “notes” somewhere so I can begin to see the world through your eyes.

“Okay,” she said. “There’s a lot less black knot on your trees than I remember!” I explained that my brother and his wife had come in the fall and cut a bunch of it down.

She was back. She’d offered to come again this spring to help me prune the fruit trees I inherited the week my husband got his cancer diagnosis. We’d just moved into our new home that week, having felt we’d outgrown our family starter home of 13 years.

She and I stood in the backyard, looking up, the ladder and a few tools that felt foreign to me scattered at our feet. This year, my husband was neither watching from the picture window, nor sleeping off the awful effects of his chemo.

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I’d thought he and I were going to manage the yard together. Truthfully, I thought I’d be his sidekick in these tasks that matched his skillset much more than mine.

I was wrong.

Over the weekend, another friend sat with me while I cleaned the waffle maker. The kids wanted waffles. Turns out the waffle maker had 7-month-old grease in every crevice. It had been stuffed in a corner and forgotten when it became clear that his keto diet and the gluten-free “croffles” weren’t going to save him.

It’s a particular kind of therapy; friends who just come and chat—in that distracted, meandering way—while tasks are completed.

Parallel. Togetherness takes the pressure off and bolsters grief’s nemesis, the ever-elusive Captain Productivity. Parallel play lends life where it would otherwise be drained. And who can afford that when so much life has been lost already?

~ ps denim

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With accompaniment from My Unapologetic Playlist:

My fancy coffee machine was eventually going to be craving coffee beans. Especially if I continued seeing this guy with the night-shift lifestyle that, in between the two sets of kids, fit so symbiotically into my life. Night shifts all week and then caffeine-sustained “day shifts” over the weekend with some of the greatest parental presence I’d ever seen. The least I could do was support his caffeine habit when he came yawning to my house in some of his rare moments to himself.

One of the young adults at church was selling freshly roasted coffee beans in a fundraiser to support an upcoming international missions trip. “I’ll take two bags,” I said. (If I’d fully grasped the ways my life—and my company—was about to change, I would have taken ten. And perhaps what I said next would have been softened by increased cash flow.)

“Great!” he said. “Thanks! And here’s my prayer card.” He reached to hand me a leaflet printed with his picture, a short description, and a bulleted list entitled Ways to Pray.

“I’ll leave that for the next person. I’m honoured to support your ministry, but I don’t pray,” I said, and then I offered a final, “Blessings!” as I walked away. To his detriment, I was testing out a new framework for truth-telling, one that went beyond the simplistic approach of defining dishonesty solely as the act of telling intentionally deceptive lies. I was shrugging off layers of people-pleasing and experimenting with a newfound volitional liberty. No more mistruths or distruths. At least, not right now. Speaking my truth felt more like an obligation than a luxury.

This meant that I didn’t just think the thing: If I don’t pray for myself or my kids, I sure as hell am not going to pray for you! I had to also say the thing. But fortunately, I retained some semblance of a filter and modified my thoughts on their way to words, sparing this kid the full extent of my obnoxiousness (“h” word and all). Lucky kid, this impressionable young Bible College student, the son of some of my most heartfelt supporters through the onslaught of my husband’s cancer crisis and recent rapid death. It was enough (wasn’t it?) to mutter the words “I don’t pray” on my journey between the sanctuary and my car. Shocking enough. Taboo enough. Offensive enough. Rude enough. Unfiltered enough.

What kind of devoted Christian doesn’t pray?! My spiritual director doesn’t know. She agrees with me when I tell her that it’s probably not that I don’t pray but that I don’t pray in ways typically recognized and encouraged by the church. “But maybe. Just maybe, my thoughts are prayers,” I say to her.

“You see,” I say, “I was taught the ACTS method, and I’ve stood in a lot of prayer circles and been witness to decades of public prayer. Sometimes it just feels way too forced for me.”

ACTS: Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, Supplication. In that order.

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Well, how can I get to Supplication, the act of asking God to fill my needs, if I don’t Confess? And I don’t confess. Because my mistakes, flaws, deficits, and insecurities have been handled—past, present, and future. I mean, I do a lot of confession, in conversation with people I love, all week long, processing these redeemed infringements. But I don’t make a habit of grovelling and begging God for a forgiveness I already have. I do thank Him regularly for that forgiveness. So, I guess that’s prayer. . . and that checks the “T” box.

But then, I’m also not that interested in checking boxes. Usually, I fall asleep before I get to Supplication.

Where’s the motivation to push through when I know He already knows everything I need even before I request it? I often think, So, what’s the point of even asking?!

And that’s just it. You see, God’s not a mind reader.

No, wait.

That’s my husband who wasn’t a mind reader. It was hard—a relationship where vulnerability became so taboo that we could no longer express our internal worlds outward to each other. And maybe there’s a lesson there—about prayer—in light of a God who is intrinsically relational. Maybe He doesn’t need us to voice our needs. Maybe all He wants is for us to express ourselves.

And that’s also me. Not a mind reader. Sole parent to a grieving, internally processing teenager. Also not a mind reader. Probably can’t grasp the extent of my love and support for her. Unless I tell her.

Well, there’s a valid prayer right there. “Dear God, help me know what she needs. (God, help me read her mind). Help me be vulnerable enough to ensure she feels my love.”

And I suppose that’s a prayer I’ve offered up a thousand times this year—if God is a mind reader.

~ ps denim

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With accompaniment from My Unapologetic Playlist:

A little note: If you’re reading my work, I want to connect with you. I love to “follow” those who are interacting with me. I receive a broad reflection of the world through so many perspectives. If you can, drop me a ❤️ here, or just on one of my “notes” somewhere so I can begin to see the world through your eyes.

It is so weird typing this in a journal 7 months after the death of my husband.

My insides are tumbling.  I met this guy, and everything is so wrong about it.

My kid and I appear at the skate park—a place I would never go, except at my daughter’s pleading. I’m wearing baggy, casual clothes—attire I would never wear, except during a year of unbearable grief. I look up, and his daughter stands before us.

Our kids’ acquaintanceship is budding into friendship. His deaf daughter and my bereaved one.  They can’t really talk, but they get by.  Not unlike their parents.

Nobody really knows where anybody stands with anybody about anything.

I find his little boy especially endearing. His daughter is not less lovely. She glows.  However, right now, regrettably, my self-protective instinct is on high alert, guarding me from the labour of being an accommodating communicator.

My daughter says, “Can you tell them, Mom?”

“Tell them what?”

“About Dad.”

“I dunno.  I’ll try if the opportunity arises.”

Twenty minutes later, standing on the pirate-themed play structure with my hand in the shape of a hook, I’ve said (for some reason I can’t recall, though I know it fit nicely), “Our family is just girls.  The three of us. . .”

“Where is her dad?” says the little boy.

I can’t quite tell if his dad is in or out of earshot.

“Well. . .” I say.

My phone rings. It’s my teen.

Now I’m off the phone.

My younger one is saying, “I’m sad.”

I hug her.

“Don’t tell them,” she says. “I don’t want you to tell them.”

“Ok.” I say.

The moment has passed anyhow. Phew.

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It’s “pretty damn normal”—this is what my therapist would say—to have a dad crush. To fall head over lunch kits for the most unlikely person.  Not my type but still somehow alluring. Probably ten years younger than me (Gah! What if it’s more?).  BMX boy, rough around the edges, single dad, divorced or never quite married.  My extreme disorientation has barred me from any awareness of his actual height.  Under 6 foot? That would never work.

But. The way he embraces his daughter with his ASL hand gestures.  The way he talks to and about his kids.  His quiet unassuming presence.  How he texts, “We had a great time” when a “kids had fun” would do. Offers to bring coffee when a “see you there” would do.

Against everything in me, I resist labelling this “insanity, inappropriate, foolishness.”  Because I’ve spent enough time in both self-condemnation and insanity, defined colloquially.

So what if I want good, or at least not entirely bad, sensations raging through me for a change?

I say “not entirely bad” because I’ve never been much for roller coaster rides. Yesterday Me thought the task was avoiding discomfort at all costs. Today Me wonders whether the task is surrendering, trusting, and proceeding with integrity. Perhaps discomfort—and even pain—are the normal, sometimes inevitable wages of taking an approach that makes “the process” unavoidable.

So, I creep him online when I get home, while my kids stare into their screens. I still can’t discern how tall—or how old—he is. I wonder how much it matters. I’m dismayed when I imagine it matters a lot. I’m liberated when I imagine it doesn’t. Then I switch sides, feeling relieved that it does matter, and terrified otherwise. I wonder who determines such matters. Also, how long is a widow supposed to wait before leaving the door ajar for romance?

The surrender is palpable, and I haven’t stopped tumbling.

~ ps denim

With accompaniment from My Unapologetic Playlist:

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With grief, I’m wet behind the ears. Six months ago, cancer kidnapped my man. A year before that, anticipatory grief broke in uninvited, though I didn’t know its name at the time. And in case you’re wondering, anticipatory grief is no joke! It’s an ambiguous initiation into an awful reality, making you pine for simpler times even before the heist happens.

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So, I’m a novice, still finding my footing. Before grief tackled me to the ground, I stored my head in the sand when it came to death. Heck, even when it came to sadness, mostly. This to my regret, ‘cause now I can’t unsee who I couldn’t be for the people around me in their darkest hours.

But then, pre-parenthood, I fancied myself the perfect parent too. Like everyone else, I dropped that illusion when I actually had kids.

If you know, you know. But if you don’t, you just. . . don’t.

Pre-grief, on the rare occasion when I allowed myself to ponder death, my curiosity drew me to a particular recurring thought. It may not have been frequent, but over nearly half a century the thought began to accumulate airtime.

What I grappled with was the stark reality that what exists only to serve us, here in our physical bodies—that’s what’s going to be left behind.

It’s almost unbearable to realize that though a sock finds its purpose only when paired with a foot, that very sock—or at least its threads—will long outlast the foot for which it was made.

“Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the Teacher. “Everything is meaningless!” Ecclesiastes 12 (NIV)

~ ps denim

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With accompaniment from My Unapologetic Playlist:

I found a wallet.

It called out to me from among the $3.99 sock bundles in the crisscross wire bin.  There was a handful of cash and several other things that made my head spin at the thought of someone having to recover them.

And there was a cheque: “To the estate of. . . .”  Any other year I wouldn’t have perceived its significance.  But here I was, a freshly squeezed widow, holding the missing wallet of a man who’d recently lost something even more valuable.

I’m a landlord and a parent.  I have a particular set of skills: I’m adept at the intricate art of online investigation. In other words, I’m good at creeping people.

I took several steps to track down the owner, starting with dropping the obligatory “In Search Of” post in the local Facebook drama & gossip hub. I texted and then called a mobile number found in the wallet.  I discovered that the misplaced man was retired from a career in finance and went by a different first name than stated on his official ID.  I learned that he was himself a member of the local Facebook gossip hub, which allowed me to tag him in my previous post.

Ultimately, our city not being huge, I dropped by the address featured on his ID and left a note in the mailbox with my phone number on it.  Really, leaving the wallet there would have more than exonerated me in my quest to get it back to its rightful owner.

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But.

My anxious part said, “What if he recently moved?  What if the paperboy steals the cash. . .”

My curious part said, “Let’s see where this goes. . .”

My nosey part said, “Things won’t turn out right in the world without my oversight.  Surely, I’m needed. . .”

My thrifty part said, “Maybe there’s a reward. . .”

My compassionate part said, “I wonder who he recently lost . . .”

Much later in the day, I received a call from a very relieved man.  As a parent, I’m private about my home’s location, so I agreed to deliver the wallet to his house.

I don’t like to give in to stereotypes, but sometimes I do.  Whenever I ran errands to private residences, I used to send my husband a name and address, checking in with him once I’d left.  Since his death, I started doing this with the women in my life.  But today, I didn’t.  This time, I just didn’t.  It’s a respectable area of town, I surmised, and I threw caution to the wind.

Upon arriving, I found a set of keys in the door. I rang the doorbell, and an elderly man of medium build appeared with a face full of pure gratitude.  We exchanged pleasantries, mostly involving the found wallet and his relief.

He embraced me and, though I’m not a hugger, somehow, I didn’t mind. Loosely, I embraced him back, this man who I knew was my father’s age. However, I wasn’t so comfortable with the kiss he planted on my cheek.

Once I stood in my own space again, for some reason I said, “You can tell a lot about a person from the contents of their wallet. I’m sorry to intrude, but have you recently lost someone?”

Our conversation turned to the experience of being peers in grief. He invited me further into his home, wanting to show me the shrines he’d raised to his wife whom he had lost a couple months ago, after some fifty years together.

He said, “I won’t hurt you!”

For the second time since arriving, I surveyed my surroundings.  I sized him up, feeling confident in my height and youthfulness when compared to his elderly frame.

He showed me around his immaculate main floor and the many surfaces where he’d placed candles, mementos, and photos of his late wife.  He sang her praises and shed a few tears.

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He spoke about their distant travels and the accrual of a considerable amount of material possessions.  He thrilled me when he shared that he’d named one of my favourite charities in his will.  He mentioned having no children. 

He thanked me again for the returned wallet, for the compassionate thoughts, for being such a dear. Embracing me again, he planted another kiss on my cheek.

We agreed to meet again in a week or two for coffee.

I thought that’s what I wanted.  To be there for this lonely man, a replica of my children’s grandfather, in his grief.

My active imagination wouldn’t overlook the notion that certainly he could be done the favour of being supplied an heir.

I’ve wondered if he’s okay.  I’ve reflected on the lost wallet, the hours that passed before he seemed even to miss it (despite my proactivity in orchestrating its return), and the keys left in the front door’s lock mechanism. Were these indicators of dementia? With no children, and no wife, who’s looking after this man?

Then I recall the kisses.

Thing is, my children’s grandfather doesn’t even kiss me on the cheek.

I have no stomach for unwanted advances of any kind—ill-intentioned or otherwise.

I’ve never picked up the phone.  And quite honestly, I’m relieved he hasn’t either.

~ ps denim

With accompaniment from My Unapologetic Playlist:

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post script

It might seem like I’m using the statement “Me Too” flippantly. I promise I’m not. Believe me, I’ve wrestled with the questions around whose grief is acceptable and which loss is valid. I’ve learned that it’s not mine to decide. It’s also okay if you can’t offer the same space.

In somber solidarity, I gaze toward the little girl whose loss started it all.

Four months have passed since his death. I’ve been invited to the annual Christmas party of our “couple friends” and their families. I’m the third (or ninth) wheel this year. I would rather take up residence with my husband at the graveyard than go to the party, but my other friends have encouraged me to go despite the feeling of my soul slowly leaking from my body.

Right now, I just want to fast forward to The End.

I find a new awareness engulfing my everyday experiences. The most mundane moments are now captioned with a painful subscript; there’s a set of newly defined meanings to everything.

That is, I find myself with an awareness of Established States of Being that I was previously ignorant of. I hold membership in the Club No One Wishes to Join (one of these states of being).
The End is another worthy state of being.
Sitting Together. That’s yet another. As is Perpetual Petty Envy.

I realize you wouldn’t know about these established states of being. Not unless you are in the Widows’ Club. Of course not. Neither did I.

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Sitting Together haunts me. And it will haunt me for a decade, I presume, and then some. Sitting together has become a crime, an indictable offence.

Mia, our hosts’ daughter, must be about 20 now. Her sister Nora, maybe 16. They sit on either side of their dad, so casual and comfortable, as if it’s nothing. He smiles and recounts with obvious pride how his eldest is in her third year of university and now plays private gigs. He casually shares how he went to the garage to get tools to repair his younger daughter’s car and how the dog bounded through the heavy snow. Like what was noteworthy was how the dog bravely faced the elements or that his older daughter plays private gigs. Like what was most remarkable wasn’t simply the fact that he was sitting there between them. Sitting at all.

Right now, it feels like this is a “special treat” I “get” to look forward to whenever I engage in the public sphere, for the next ten years, and into perpetuity, until the state known as The End arrives.

The next day, I take my girls to the movies; to a musical, no less. Their dad—he loved movies. He loved theatres. He loved musicals. He loved his girls.

Us, at the theatre. Another version of Sitting Together.

Elphaba, green like me, watches her dreams go up in the smoke of a hot air balloon that just couldn’t quite achieve lift off, with circumstances she didn’t choose threatening to dash her every hope—and very existence—into the ground. Merciless circumstance. Her very life, up in ashes.

Elphaba accepts all the loss, moving headlong into it. And she rises, resilient and ready. And that’s largely because of the battles she’s already fought. She’s no stranger to adversity and hopeless circumstances.

Surviving and Surrender: these are the Established States of Being she invites me into.

~ ps denim

With accompaniment from My Unapologetic Playlist:

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Resonant Writing

• Kevin David Kridner, The Subtle Ways we Try to be God

A year ago, I got taken down by a jar of pickles. Standing in the kitchen, hand cushioned by the silicone gripper, I still couldn’t do it. Entering the space a couple minutes later, my emaciated husband found me in tears still twisting away at the jar.

This morning it’s a primary school bike rodeo taking me down. I asked for the help I needed a week or two ago. Wren’s bike is now in tip-top shape. I even took her out for practice a couple times over the weekend. I was hopeful that with the training wheels set to the more advanced level, she might rock that rodeo.

Two summers passed her by while her daddy first, battled starvation, and second, died. She’s not exactly the most advanced bike rider.

Yesterday I picked her up a bike lock at the dollar store. We’re all set, I thought, exhaling.

This morning, as usual, we’re running late, and she’s told me she needs her training wheels set back to the beginner level. Sliding two pieces of bread into the toaster, I take a deep steadying breath. I mentally rehearse myself twisting the Phillips screwdriver for the win, first on one side of the bike, and then the other.

Probably going to be late for school—again—but I GOT THIS.

Crouching down next to the bike in the garage, it suddenly dawns on me that this is not a job I can complete effortlessly, even with Phillip’s help. Nope, those are bolts and there’s very little play between their edges and the bracket.

Heart racing, I bring that little bike into the house, situating it on the kitchen floor. The breakfast and lunch-prep clutter suddenly looks like base camp, and there’s a mountain range, stretching as far as the eye can see in every direction, my own shower and tooth-brushing being one of the nearby low-elevation peaks.

The tears start to flow, not helping in any way with the clarity I need to decide which tool to use to traverse this first peak. There’s a power tool that looks a bit like a gun. But its biggest attachment is too small for these bolts. Panicked, I can’t seem to find a wrench, but there is a set of pliers. Watching me try to turn the bolt through eyes blurred with tears, our current handiest family member—the eight-year-old—tells me she thinks there’s a wrench in her toolbox in her room. She returns with that wrench but to no avail. These bolts aren’t budging for me.

I mentally begin to reschedule my morning, deciding which activities to cut away to make space—first, for the help I need with addressing this task; second, for duplicate trips to the school, depositing my tardy child and returning later with the bike; and third, to buffer the emotional weight of it all. Who knows how long these tears will flow and what other sorrows and disappointments will be caught up in the flash flood.

I feel so fragile. The simplest of circumstances can derail my entire day. I miss the steady strength I (we) once had and my ability to ably and predictably schedule a full day without batting an eyelash, except at my husband as he sits next to his daughter’s bike, installing the training wheels without breaking eye contact.

~ ps denim

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Editors note: Some images in this article were created with AI; However, the writing never is.

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He and I didn’t agree on much.

But, hand-in-hand, on September 5th, 2023, we left the regional cancer clinic after his 11:30 am initial consult.  We went to Winners/ HomeSense where we walked around a while, browsing. It was an interesting place for a pair of minimalists to find themselves immediately after receiving a devastating prognostic timeline. I don’t know what else we may or may not have bought, but what we did pick up was a trio of comedic and gaudy paintings of cats portrayed in the style of Regency-era nobility.  These portraits weren’t even on sale.

A month before, and incidentally, the same week Robben had been diagnosed with cancer, we’d moved out of our starter home and into our dream home. Well, mine anyways—perfect enough for the four of us that I’d never want an upgrade.  I remember it as a time of washing walls and crying.

On the walls of our new home, these eccentric paintings of noble cats were going to thrill our girls—especially since we’d struck an agreement to hang the art in the traffic-rich stairwell to the basement without so much as a comment to them.  

And I thought, these three cats, so faithfully resembling Pride and Prejudice characters, are as unlikely inhabitants of our home as terminal cancer is of my husband’s otherwise youthful & healthy body.

I remember wondering what tales they would tell upon so watchfully observing the coming days. What whispers would they catch? What tears would they witness, as the four of us, beads on a string, dangled precariously with an invisible knife threatening the knot holding us together?

A nominal minimalist, I feared a little that I’d never be able to part with these silly portraits, bought on the blind impulse of shock and despair, in a spirit of jest, poking back at a God who allowed the preposterous to actually happen.

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After overly optimistic attempts at eating, we left the shopping district. I suppose I must have taken him back and admitted him to the hospital where they immediately began interventions to prepare him for chemo.

And then, with the cat portraits occupying the passenger seat and shoving me over into the driver’s seat where he should have been, I would’ve driven the hour home. I hid them somewhere in the house until he returned and, with resolve in the face of his starvation and weakness, tried to teach me to hang them. 

That was back in the days when we believed that the best we could do was make me into the handyman he would no longer be for us.

Robben and I though, we weren’t alike.  I wonder what the cats meant to him.

~ ps denim

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Editors note: The images in this article are not replicas of the actual paintings described. They were created with AI; However, the writing never is.

Love cats? Check out my story The Little Black Moirologist.

Don’t love cats? That’s okay. It’s not really about cats.

The last time I was thinking about relationships from the outside it was 2004. The stakes were ultra-low. I didn’t think that at the time. I was terrified.

I mean, the stakes were so freaking high. They were huge.

There’s no use letting Today Me (TM) rewrite the story of Yesterday Me (YM) through TM’s eyes.

No. That’s not fair.

YM rated those stakes so high, they rivalled the elevation of the Annapurna mountain range we trekked on Day 9–both of our trip and our relationship upgrade.

I deplaned in Kathmandu and, seeing him for the first time since “just friends,” somehow, with a brand-new set of eyes, quite literally walked into his arms. I hadn’t been in them before, despite his pre-departure confession, and I didn’t know until that very moment that it was for sure where I wanted to be.

We spent those early days in the vibrant Thamel district, a brand-new couple, strolling through colourful markets filled with incense, Tibetan singing bowls, and pirated CDs, fingers intertwined and hearts racing. Aside from the odd Britney Spears poster, all things were foreign and, overloading my senses, held allure commensurate with their novelty. In response to the earnest and heavily accented “May-be la-ter,” retorts of the vendors when their offerings were declined, we coined our inside jokes, whispering to each other, “May-be ne-ver?” We browsed trekking gear and laughed and debated over lassi in cozy cafés. Cafe Long Time Ago, in Pokhara, eventually became our favourite.

YM rated those stakes so highly that, in his fresh embrace, in a guest house in Kathmandu, pressing an earbud into his ear and hitting play on Alanis Morissette’s “Head Over Feet”, she said: “This song is for you. But you must take it with a grain of salt.”

That did not go over well.

In his defence, how can you fall head over feet while holding on to grains of salt?

YM rated those stakes so highly that even though he kept saying, “I love you,” she held off for months until she’d met his family, he’d met hers, and she was rock solid sure. The kind of certainty that can only follow a months-long analysis of the existential meaning behind each word:

I.

Love.

You.

TM has different stakes. She’s a grieving widow with two grieving children in tow.

~ ps denim

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I keep wondering why I don't just delete the entry in our family calendar that says:

"Block for travel."

Or the one that says:

"(Tentative) Travel to South Africa."

Or

“(Tentative) Cruise Vacation."

I see them every time I open my calendar.

Sort of how I see the stark stats on esophageal cancer every time I open an academic journal article.

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Last week, for the first time in days, my husband ventured out of bed and out of the house for a medical appointment. Afterward, we scrambled to get the girls together, bringing Grandma along. Taking full advantage of these moments, we turned a visit to Booster Juice into a world-class family vacation.

On the way down Main Street, I had a split-second flashback of life before the illness: carefree liberty, sitting in an air-conditioned car, popping in for a bubble tea and taking a window-shopping stroll in the beautiful historic downtown.

But that image quickly faded into our reality.

Truth is, the enjoyment and sense of gratitude for those thumb wars while awaiting snack-size smoothies was enough.

There is always enough.

~ ps denim

With accompaniment from My Unapologetic Playlist

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Mar 30, 2026

The Lost and Found

What do you do when something awful happens; something so dreadful that you lose the context around which you’ve built your life; so disastrous that you lose your very self?

As for me, I began to write—out of desperation, in a bid to recover or rebuild myself. I write because I know no other means to traverse this devastation.  I write, without intent, without expectation for what will emerge—but trusting that something restorative, or at least honest, will land on the page.

In the quiet hours before dawn, wide awake, I wrestle with thoughts that won’t recede and savour words that reveal more than I imagined they could. And music comes with me. I write and I listen to music. Like a music arranger, I absorb the melody and lyrics and metabolize them through my soul. What emerges is prose stripped to its vulnerable core: Theories and queries about love, loss, faith, the past, present, and future.  Resisting the urge to cling to concrete answers or promises made to a future self who is nothing more than a mist, the story unfolds in real time—responding to circumstances, embracing uncertainty, and finding meaning in single lines that grow as I water them. At times bringing raw cynicism; other times, a voice of stubborn hope.  Unfiltered questions for the darkness, sincere discourse with the light.  An exploration of the person I was, acceptance for the person I am, and a quest to uncover the person I might capriciously become.

The Homestead

This journal is a homestead for all of that. Loss—whether the sudden cataclysmic type or the subtle sustained kind—is not just an event, but a series of moments that shape who we are and who we may—or may no longer—become. You’re invited to witness and join this unsettled journey where connecting, processing, and learning to grieve become a collective experience. Where even the smallest heartbreaks are worthy of exploration and commemoration.

So, linger as I share stories born of restless ponderings and lines scribbled after midnight. Loiter among keystrokes exploring the formation of an unforetellable future. Eavesdrop a little over this deeply personal conversation and experience the power of a single line to spark connection.

When calamity struck, my headphones were my medication and my pen and ink became my lifeline and compass. As you engage in my musings, whether it be through the prose or the attached playlists, may you find yourself a little closer to home.

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