19 Tuesday Sep 2017
Posted in Communication, Personal, Uncategorized, Writing
Tags
dailypost, Nature, photography, poem, poetry, writing prompt
Response to the WordPress Daily Post prompt: Tentative
No 4-leaf Clovers
tentative morning
not a four-leaf clover here
dead leaves, cold rain
Copyright © 2017-09-19, by Lizl Bennefeld.
09 Saturday Sep 2017
Posted in Families, Personal, Reflections
Within the past ten months or so, the ranks of relatives have thinned dramatically.
- October 20, Aunt Dorothy, Mother’s sister (98 yrs)
- November 15, Mother (94 yrs)
- February 26, Dad (100 yrs)
- May 17, Uncle Wayne, Dad’s brother (77 yrs)
- July 20, Uncle Jim, Mother’s brother-in-law (93 yrs)
- July 31, Uncle Albert, Dad’s brother (95 yrs)
- September 5, Aunt Marion, Dad’s sister (88 yrs)
I believe that I will set aside some time for quiet.
06 Wednesday Sep 2017
Waiting in her chair
morning stretches out
footsteps back and forth … away
when is it my turn?sometimes it’s hard, being good,
waiting for ‘That’s my good Thadd!’
Photo and verse, Copyright © 2017-09-06, by Elizabeth W. Bennefeld.
For WordPress Weekly Photo Challenge: Waiting.
27 Saturday May 2017
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So often, driving home on the Memorial Day weekend, the skies were littered with these bright, plump clouds, a brilliant blue background that seemed to reach up forever.
My father was the sexton and groundskeeper for the village cemetery. We children worked for him during the summers, and also, leading up to the Memorial Day weekend, when everything had to be perfect.
This will be the first Memorial Day weekend without him.
My sister posted a picture that she’d scanned in hi-res from the assortment of photographs and letters she took with her back to the East Coast, after Father’s funeral. This one’s from the war years and sent by Father to Mother.
They were married before Pearl Harbor. Mother joined the Navy afterward. Father was in the Army [training sergeant] at Fort Dodge, having joined the Army before the U.S. entered the war, which is how he ended up in the same state as Mother.
20 Saturday May 2017
Posted in Blessings, Books, Communication, Creating order, Families
≈ Comments Off on An interlude for grief
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I find myself overwhelmed by emotion, revisiting in my mind the time close to my mother’s death, seeing her fear over many months, and then the letting go of fear. It is overwhelming to realize once again that she is now free from all fear and free from the continual grief at the ongoing sense of the losses that so altered her life: the sharp dislocation between who she knew that she is and the life that she found herself living. The struggle to live as herself in a disparate world.
I could only try to comfort her. I could not take away the fear because I could not change reality. Her fears were realistic, and her grief was real.
And then, I look at where I am finding the most aid and comfort in my own grieving process. A textbook on bridging the gap between grief and bereavement counseling and practice that the grief counselor loaned me, the last time she was here. I think, maybe I also carry a lot of nonfinite grief.
SpO2=98%, P=69bpm
BG=117 mg/dL
