Category: good grief

Saying goodbye to a friend

by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, baking, fitness, good grief, health, tweens

My daughter’s friend delivered some unexpected news last week. Without preamble, she sent a one line email declaring that she was moving. To California. Like, soon. 

Chocolate chip cookies

 

Well. It’s not the first time that one of her close friends have moved away; it’s the third time, actually. It seems to be hitting her in a different way this time, however, which I imagine is due to her developmental stage. She is feeling it more, so of course, I am feeling it more as well. She was visibly sad, and was telling anyone in the family who would listen about how her friend was moving and how much she was going to miss her. 

Then a funny thing happened: as I was busily trying to think of a way to help her to feel better, she was busily figuring it put for herself. This is what she did: 

  1. She took construction paper and crayons and made a book for her friend. The book’s title? “Things I like about (name of friend)”.
  2. She asked me if we could bake some chocolate chip cookies for her friend, having ascertained beforehand that these were her favorite kind of cookies (note: date stamp on photo is incorrect; it’s a new camera and I’ve yet to set the date!).
  3. She obtained her friend’s new phone number in California, and in addition to placing it in a safe place, she made sure I had saved it in my cell phone as a safety measure.
  4. She hunted down a gift bag (purple! purple is her friend’s favorite color!) that was big enough to hold the construction paper book without folding it, the container of cookies, and an “I’m going to miss you!” greeting card, then assembled the gift.

So, she did all of these things just by instinct. She thought she was putting together a nice present for her friend and making sure they could stay in touch. I realized that she was processing her grief, and doing it by instinct, and in a healthy way. 

Then, she put it all aside and went out in the yard to hula hoop for an hour. 

 

Isn’t it amazing how much our children teach us about life (see note about picture date stamp, #2 above)?

Toy Story 3

by Karen, posted in family, good grief, tweens
Promotional Movie Poster for TOY STORY 3

When I take my daughter to see a (kids) movie, my expectations are generally quite low. I find this to be an effective strategy in maximizing any potential enjoyment of said movie, as well as to minimize any potential boredom (my other strategy is to bring my knitting and a book light; I can knit half a hat in the time it takes to yawn through a less than engaging movie!).  

Enter Toy Story 3, however, and all bets are off. I mean, this is a movie with which I have a history. I have a tweenage daughter, but have I mentioned that I also have a teenage son?  

The original Toy Story movie was released in 2005, when my son was just 6 years old. We were already quite fond of many of Disney’s movies, so seeing Toy Story was a given. Well, we both loved it. So, we had the Woody and Buzz Lightyear figures; we had the Potato Heads, first the Mr., and later on, the Mrs. (it could be that it was as much for my enjoyment as it was for his!). Life was good.  

Many years passed, as of course they will, and now my son is 18 years old. He is in college. He is in the process of creating his own life (read: without parents hovering over his shoulder). To paraphrase Matt from the Matty in the Morning Radio Show, did I really need to see this right now? The boy in the movie giving away all of his toys and leaving home? “I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t breathe,” he said. Okay, so…I can relate. Big time.  

My husband and I went to see this movie together (this did make me notice the strange lack of a male parent in these movies), and we both agreed that it was excellent, moving, and poignant…and difficult to watch. We were overwhelmed.  

So, are you the parent of a teenager who is leaving/has recently left the nest? If you are on the fence about seeing Toy Story 3, may I nudge off of it, in the direction of seeing the movie? You must not miss this. Go. Bring any remaining off-spring you have around the house. They will enjoy no less, albeit on a different level.  

Oh, and bring Kleenex.

Lunch and learn

by Karen, posted in education, good grief, health

The first Thursday of the month, Amy Wood Psy.D. presents a workshop series entitled “Lifewise at Lunch”. It’s held at the Kennebunk Free Library downstairs in Hank’s Room.

It kicked off last week on June 3rd. The talks run from noon until 1:00pm She began and ended this first one on time, so if you work in the area and want to pop in on your lunch break, it might be doable. There were around 20 people attending, ranging in age from a toddler (with his mother) to a man who was 89  (I know this because he announced it to the presenter). She handed out an outline upon which she elaborated a bit but,  for the most part, stuck to closely.

Some of these people had clearly attended her talks in the past, and therefore knew each other, but there were some first timers like myself. Amy was gracious and welcoming to us all.

The subject of this first talk in the series was “Getting Unstuck”. Amy welcomed questions from the audience throughout, and treated them all (including, “How do you not get to be 89 years old?) with dignity and respect…and some humor.

Other talks coming up in the series include: Improving Your Intuition, Thriving in the Face of Change, Overcoming Overwhelm, Emotional Intelligence, Boosting Your Creativity, What’s the Use of Worrying, Living From a Strengths-Based Perspective, and Letting Go of Self-Limiting Beliefs.

For you indecisive people and you last-minute people out there, you don’t have to register in advance; just show up.
Have any of you attended any of these “Lifewise at Lunch” talks before? What did you think?

parting is such…(insert oxymoronic phrase)

by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, baking, books, good grief, recipes

my best work friend is moving on to greener pastures in the workforce…happy for her, sad for me.  of course,we plan to stay in touch and have even gone so far as to devise ways to accomplish this (we don’t live near each other), but it is still happy/sad. In The Happiness Project (http://www.happiness-project.com/), author Gretchen Rubin talks about this feeling (she calls it ‘happy/unhappy’ in her book), when the thing that makes you happy also makes you unhappy…one of her examples is eating more than one cupcake…i can relate to that.

how to officially say goodbye? usually at my company we offer up a cake of some sort (although more often than not, my departing friend is the cake baker/procurer) and a gift certificate to a local business.

her favorite cake is chocolate cake with chocolate frosting; guess i’d better get a-bakin’~http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Deep-Dark-Chocolate-Cake/Detail.aspx seems like as good a place to start as any.

how do you say goodbye to (favorite) work colleagues?

what are some favorite goodbye gifts that you have given (or received) under similar circumstances?

here is a link to some goodbye poems (may also be useful  in case any of you are cardmakers or scrapbookers ): http://www.poem-poetry.com/goodbye-poems.html

happy easter

by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, family, good grief, tweens

one of my favorite holidays growing up was easter. my father loved easter, and always went out of his way to make it fun for us. we had the requisite easter baskets, usually one of the prepackaged, pre-filled ones from the closest department store (we were a family of 4 kids born in 6 years, after all), but i always loved mine. the best part of the day was the easter egg hunt. dad would fill the plastic easter eggs with small change and “hide” them around the house (my father was disabled and not-so-agile, so most of the eggs were at about waist level, in plain sight). we would race around until we had found them all.

this year is the first that neither of my kids believe in the easter bunny anymore. here’s the funny thing about that though: they both still expect baskets and booty from the fictional bunny. as a mother, i certainly don’t want to disappoint them, but this year i wanted to focus on “less is more” and so i scaled things back some. instead of large, overstuffed baskets, i made them easter bunny bags to hold their candy (http://www.goodhousekeeping.com/home/holiday-ideas/easter-table-decorations), an idea i got from Good Housekeeping Magazine. they were easy to make, and more importantly, they were quick, since it was 10pm on easter eve before i got to actually assemble said bunnies. the other good thing about these little bunnies is that they form an enclosed space within which the contents must conform; no candy or toys spilling out over the tops and the sides…another reminder for me not to go “over the top” with filling them.  i did, of course, fill the plastic eggs with small change for the egg hunt. even though the morning will be rushed, with us getting ready to drive an hour and a half to have dinner with family out-of-state, and the older child getting ready to go to work, we will have our traditional egg hunt.

i would not want to miss that opportunity to honor my dad. 🙂

what easter rituals does your family have? are they carried over from your childhood?

grieving my dead relatives, part 3

by Karen, posted in good grief, italian

my paternal grandmother’s birthday is today. her name was originally ‘maria’, anglicized to ‘mary’  (as so many were so many others) when she arrived here from italy around 1924 (http://www.ellisisland.org/). she died at the age of 93, about 6 years ago. she had sort of reconciled herself to the reality of her cognitive decline, as evidenced by her selling her house and moving in with my brother’s family a couple of years prior. he made her a little apartment in the basement of his home, with a bedroom, bathroom, kitchen area, and living room. that day, she got up in the early morning as she always did, made her cup of instant coffee in the microwave, sat down at her little kitchen table, and died. my brother heard her fall and ran down to help, but it was obvious that she was already well on her way to see God, so he just held her there on his lap on the floor until she passed. isn’t that the best way to die, while living your life?

grieving my dead relatives, part 2

by Karen, posted in good grief

march 15 was the anniversary of the day my father died and joined my mother.  had he not been addicted to cigarettes, alcohol, and gambling in his 20’s,  he’d have been 72 years old. instead, he’s been in that great rehab in the sky (i hope…) for 12 long years. as i have often done since he died, i had a fried clam dinner in his honor, because for me, the inherited addiction gene has (in my post twenties life) been expressing itself  in relation to food (as in “it’s all about the food”). (is this wrong??). why fried clams? well, for one thing, unlike my opinion of my mother’s food favorites (see prior blog post entitled “grieving my dead relatives, part 1) which i mostly deplored, i shared a love for many of my father’s favorite foods: coffee, black  (the beverage, NOT the jello), almost any kind of doughnut,  liver, lumberjack breakfasts, lamb chops, hot fudge sundaes, all things chocolate…all good things. the other reason is that fried clams were on the plate for his Last Supper. after days of existing mostly on air and water (the lung tumor had the upper hand by this point and the dying process was well underway), he suddenly sat up in the hospice hospital bed in the living room and said, “i want a fried clam dinner!” which my brother promptly procured and which he really did sit up and eat, every last bite. then, he went to sleep and never woke up, dying about a day and a half later. so, some years i just buy a box of fried clams and eat it myself, no fanfare…kind of an eating meditative prayer. this year i invited my husband to join me and we went to the Maine Diner (http://www.mainediner.com/). we muddied the tradition up a bit; we ordered buffalo chicken fingers for dessert, a food that my father never had, to the best of my knowledge. (was that wrong??)

what do you thing about observing the anniversary of a parent’s “deathday”?

grieving my dead relatives, part 1

by Karen, posted in good grief

necco wafers, tootsie rolls, pepper and egg sandwiches, chipped beef on toast, coffee jello, split pea soup, hermit cookies… what do these foods have in common?  well, for  one thing, they are all foods that i don’t like much. also, they were some of my mother favorites  (i’m sure there is something very freudian in that admission). Her birthday was march 13, and if she hadn’t been dead since 1996, she’d have turned 70. do your loved ones that have died live on in your memory in the context of food, as do mine?  well-known grief expert elizabeth kubler-ross states that “Mourning can go on for years and years. It doesn’t end after a year:  that’s a false fantasy.” how much more pleasant are the memories when viewed through the lens of one’s own (or her own!) preferred foods? i say: much more!

here’s elizabeth kubler-ross’ website: http://www.ekrfoundation.org/