Tag: family

The BRAVE Interview #22 May 2018: Melanie Delorme

by Karen, posted in Being BRAVE, books, Brave books, Catching women being brave, Clarity, comfort, family, Interviews, relationships, The BRAVE Interviews

Welcome to this month’s BRAVE Interview with Melanie Delorme!

I am a teacher, a wife, a mother, an author who was given the role of bereaved mom in 2008 when my 8-year-old son, Garrett, was accidentally shot and killed in a hunting accident.

It would have been so easy to allow this horrific experience to define me as a grief-stricken mom for the rest of my life. I’m not sure how long it took me to realize that Garrett deserved a better legacy than that.

I also realized that healing and moving forward was my choice.

I try to choose every day to celebrate Garrett’s life and to remember that knowing him for eight years made me a better person.

I spent a lot of time writing in a journal during the first few years after Garrett’s death. I have since turned my writing into a book and published it. It is entitled, After the Flowers Die: A Handbook of Heartache, Hope and Healing After Losing a Child. I do not want any bereaved parent to ever feel alone.  I have recently created a website, promoted my book at book signings, participated in my first TV interview, participated in a live grief webinar. Currently I am working on creating a journaling course for grieving parents.

When I think about the word Brave, I realize that sometimes bravery is simply getting out of bed and facing the world every day.

Sometimes bravery feels more like survival. While I don’t feel brave every day, I will continue to choose to move forward keeping my son’s memory alive through my writing and speaking.

My website: www.MelanieDelorme.com

My book on Amazon:  After the Flowers Die: A Handbook of Heartache, Hope and Healing After Losing a Child

 

Thank you so much for sharing your story with us, Melanie!

Read the other BRAVE Interviews here: The BRAVE Interviews

IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO BE INTERVIEWED FOR THIS SERIES ABOUT SOMETHING BRAVE YOU HAVE DONE IN YOUR OWN LIFE, SEND ME AN EMAIL HERE: karen@karencreamer.com

The Annual Ides of March Quest for Fried Clams

by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, Adult children, celebrations, comfort, family, good grief, quest for the best, restaurants

My dad’s last meal was fried clams.

Flashback to 1998. Dad was dying of lung cancer. The living room was dominated by the hospital bed sent by hospice once it was clear he could no longer manage the climb to the second floor bedroom. He had been in and out of consciousness for several days when he suddenly became alert again, like himself. This day also happened to be my mother’s birthday. She had died two years prior of cancer.

After he had been turning up his nose at solid food for days, he said he wanted to eat. What do you want, Dad? Whatever it is, we’ll get it.

He wanted fried clams and french fries from (the famous!) Kelly’s Roast Beef in Revere. So, my brother drove to Revere (not so very far from where we were) to get him what he wanted.

He ate and enjoyed every last bite.

And then he fell asleep, drifting into a coma from which he would not awaken. He died peacefully two days later on March 15, 1998.

Every year, I have fried clams on March 15th to commemorate this experience and to celebrate my Dad.

This year, at the recommendation of my friend Stephanie, we tried a new place in New Hampshire, Petey’s Summertime Seafood and Bar.

It was definitely worth the trip!

So maybe I expanded on the fried clams…Dad loved ice cream sundaes, too, and I am my father’s daughter. 🙂

And he loved martinis, dry, with two olives…but that’s a different story.

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**Disclaimer: This is my memory of this experience. Other’s remembrances may differ.**

The BRAVE Interview #19 February 2018: Barbara Ryland

by Karen, posted in Being BRAVE, Catching women being brave, Interviews, The BRAVE Interviews

Welcome to this month’s interview with my good friend, Barbara Ryland!

My Brave Thing

As a child growing up, I had no father.

My parents were divorced when I was an infant, and my father moved far away.  I had no contact with him, with any of his siblings or with my paternal grandparents. After I married and had my own children, it became very important to me to meet my paternal grandmother who was in her 80’s. I wanted so much to know her before she died. So I made plans to go to Gulfport, Mississippi, where she lived and where my father had grown up. I had hopes of meeting him, also, but he was living in Texas, and I was unsure if he would be able to meet me in Mississippi.

One of my father’s sisters, an aunt who lived in Georgia, had been in touch with me a few years before. She suggested that I fly to Atlanta, and she would drive me to Gulfport.

So on an early July morning with my heart thumping and limbs trembling, I began my journey to meet my father’s family of origin.

I spent two wonderful weeks in Gulfport meeting my grandmother and many aunts, uncles, and cousins. And my father and his wife did come over for a few days from Texas.  I was so glad I had taken that step of meeting part of my family.  Most of all, I was grateful for their loving and welcoming me, a family member yet a stranger.

My grandmother died several years after that, but until her death, we talked once a week on the phone. My father died about 12 years later, but we maintained contact throughout those years and visited each other. Some of my aunts and uncles have died, but I am still in touch with those who are alive as well as with my cousins.

Thank you so much for sharing your personal story with us, Barbara!

Read the other BRAVE interviews here: https://kwrites.com/?s=The+BRAVE+Interview

If YOU would like to be interviewed for this series about something brave you have done in your own life, send me an email here: kmcwrites@gmail.com

The BRAVE Interview #14 September 2017: Sylvia Wesley

by Karen, posted in Adult children, Being BRAVE, Catching women being brave, family, Interviews, relationships, The BRAVE Interviews, Travel, Turning 50

Here is this month’s BRAVE Interview with Sylvia Wesley! Enjoy!

  1. WHO are you? I’m a 61-year-old white woman—wife, mother, nurse, and pseudo-bon vivant!
  2. WHAT is your One Brave Thing? Sometimes I feel like just living every day is a Brave Thing and it is difficult to choose a single event!  As a nurse, it seems like so many of my ‘brave things’ encompass caring for people—my dad and my brother, who both died of cancer; my mom with multiple surgeries; friends with HIV/AIDS.  As a mom I gave birth to twins who were 10 weeks premature and their first 6 months of life was pretty hectic, to put it mildly.  As a wife, still being married after 38 years could be considered brave—but probably the bravest aspect there is that I married a black man in 1979, only 12 years after the Supreme Court ruled interracial marriage was not illegal, and our early years involved some struggles in a very white New England. So, after all that, I decided to choose a joyous adventure as my One Brave Thing—I went to Burning Man!
  3. WHEN did you do it? 8/28-9/1, 2006
  4. WHERE did it occur? Black Rock Desert, NV
  5. HOW did you make it happen? Mostly my daughter made the initial experience happen.  She had been going to Burning Man for a few years and always marveled at how awesome it was and she was sure I would love it.  So for my 50th birthday, I was given a ticket to TTITD (aka ‘that thing in the desert’).  Which meant I would be sharing camping space with 38,000+ other adventuring nomads for a week in rather hostile environmental conditions, and only knowing one other person.  A little scary having to be self-reliant in an unknown situation, camping with my daughter’s friends who only had her assurances that I was ‘fun, non-judgmental, fully capable of taking care of myself, and would not act like everybody’s mother.’  So I packed my bags and flew to LA.  We readied all our camping equipment, some party outfits, food and water for a week, and did a 12 hour ride/drive-share to the event with a heretofore unknown person.  After 12+ hours, in a very small mini-van, we were all fast friends.  Getting to and from is just as much of an adventure as being there!
  6. WHY did you do it? For the adventure!  It was one of the best experiences of my life—the bigger-than-life art, the music, the people, the sense of oneness—all magnificent.  I came away with a whole new sense of self.  And as my daughter predicted, I would want to go every year after that, and did so for the next 7 years.  ‘Life’ has since interrupted my annual trek, and I have not been for the past 3 years, but look forward to resuming visits to my personal Mecca in the near future.

Thank you for sharing your story with us, Sylvia!

If anybody wants to learn more about the culture that is Burning Man, go to https://burningman.org/

Read the other BRAVE interviews here: https://kwrites.com/?s=The+BRAVE+Interview

If you would like to be interviewed for this series about something brave you have done in your life, email me at kmcwrites@gmail.com!

What goes around

by Karen, posted in Adult children, family, teens

When I graduated from high school, one of the things that I was given was a Lane cedar mini-keepsake box. I know this because, unlike other things I might have been given that day, I still have my Lane cedar mini-keepsake box. One of the reasons that I was so excited to receive it was because my mother had one. It had been on her bureau for as long as I could remember, and she kept who-knew-what in it. I didn’t know, because she kept it locked.

Darn!

Anyway, I keep important keepsakes in mine, like childhood memorabilia (my pet rock!), photos, a scrap of paper with my grandmother’s writing on it. That’s mine on the left. My daughter’s is on the right.

Fast forward to 2017, and my own daughter has graduated from high school. Lane stopped this practice of bestowing the boxes in the 1980’s, I believe, but I thought, wouldn’t it be cool if I got her one? I have seen a few here and there over the years, but they were in abysmal shape. Two days ago, I spotted one at a Flea Market on my way to Boothbay. When they saw my interest, the very nice couple behind the table started to tell me about the history of it. Hey, these were people who loved the story as much as the object! My kind of people!

Alas, the key was missing. In the past, this was a deal breaker for me. This time though, I decided to trust my gut and buy it anyway.

We presented it to my daughter today. My husband told her he would get a key for hers, making it truly a gift from both of her parents that I hope she will tell her own daughter about someday, as she presents her with one of her own.

Who am I? RESULTS!

by Karen, posted in family, He and me, health, no fear

So, the results are in! No big surprises to be found here. I am happy to know what I am made of, so to speak. I am grateful to my husband for giving me this gift. No Atlantean heritage in this mix. No Lilliputian. Just about a 50/50 split between Southern Europe (Italian) and Northwestern European (Irish/Scottish/Welsh) and a few other things thrown in.

 

Here’s what I didn’t expect: today I got an email informing me of relatives of mine that they have found. About a dozen fourth cousins. If they are fourth cousins (otherwise known as first cousins twice removed, per the email), are they really related to me?

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Like, my coworkers might be more closely related to me.

Or, the crows outside my window.

Just a thought.

Hello from Heaven

by Karen, posted in Adult children, Angels, family, good grief, relationships
big-nana
Big Nana with her great-granddaughter Ariana in her kitchen in Nantasket

As I recently wrote, my son moved into his new apartment. Apartments, as we all know, usually need furniture. As a mother, I want to (over) help him with this. When I got my first apartment, my mother and my grandmother went to great lengths to make sure I had everything I might need or want, opening their cupboards, closets, drawers, and wallets to help me get things I didn’t even know I would need. I always knew that I would do the same for my own children one day.

The current need for my son’s apartment is for a kitchen table and chairs. I remembered my grandmother’s kitchen table has been stored at my brother’s house for years. I checked to make sure it was still there and usable. My brother determined (after some digging) that it was.
I started thinking of how my grandmother, Big Nana, spent most of her life helping her family. She has been dead since 2004, but she is still helping her family all these years after her death. Because now her kitchen table and chairs, at which we ate so many wonderful, lovingly prepared meals, will now serve my son and his girlfriend.

And here is the biggest gift of all: when my brother was looking for the chairs, he found a photo Nana, as well as some of my mother and father that I have never seen before.

It feels like they are all saying ‘Hello’ to us from heaven tonight, and letting us know that they are still watching over us and taking care of us, even though they are not here physically with us anymore.

What a wonderful start to 2017.

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BOOK REVIEW: A Secret Music by Susan Doherty Hannaford

by Karen, posted in author, books, Brave books, writing

I read this book at the recommendation of my friend, Melissa. This is another one of those books that came to me because of the book I wrote, One Brave Thing.  I took a picture of the cover and then forgot about it for a few weeks. I’m so glad that I remembered! I thought this secret musicbook was wonderful. It’s about a family of five in the early 1900’s that is seemingly well off during hard economic times.  Dad works long hours, mom has an illness that is shrouded in secrecy for years, as does one of the children. Two of the three keep it hidden from the adults in their lives, which include their clergy and their aunt, who is a second mother to them all. Many of the family members are gifted musically, Lawrence most publicly of all. I didn’t want to put this book down, even though it deals with difficult subject matter, because I always wanted to know what was going to happen next.

 

There are some wonderful sentences in this book, so true that I copied them down many of them in my journal.

 

The author gives one of the most excellent descriptions of mental illness I have ever read on page 195:  “It’s like in the broad daylight, it’s still dark… There is a wall around her and she can’t get out and nobody can get in.”

Another poetic quote from page 196: “… people don’t understand how a place like this fills up that empty space you didn’t know was empty.” And this from page 201: “The more he said things out loud, the lighter he felt.” And this, from page 235 from the aunt:  “It has always been my preference to live in the brightly lit side of my life.” I’d better stop now, or there will not be any book left for you to read!

I loved all of the characters in this book. I had the clear thought when listening to Father McMahon speak to Lawrence that if he had been the priest at my church, I would probably have stayed a practicing Catholic.

 

Definitely read this book! And when you finish it, read my book, One Brave Thing! And tell two friends! Thank you!

My foremothers

by Karen, posted in family, good grief

This is the first Mother’s Day in 3 years that I have had the day off from work.

YAY!

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It gave me more time to spend with my kids, for which I am endlessly grateful. It also gave me more time for reflection, for which I am also very grateful. In years past, I have gone to the ocean to remember my mother and grandmothers, which I got to do today.

In the past, I have written about ‘grieving my dead relatives’ quite often. Today, for some reason, I feel inspired to put up their wedding pictures instead.

My mother and grandmothers: strong, confident, capable women, all. Even if they didn’t always know it.

All are greatly loved and missed.

Just for fun, I am adding a wedding picture of my own (recently taken when renewing our commitment to one another).

Me and Bill

Happy Mother’s Day!!