Mom had excellent taste in friends and I have long been grateful for the wonderful circle of friends that I was brought up in, and have inherited. We have been enveloped in love by friends and family these last few months (and years), and it is overwhelming (in a good way) to see so many […]
Last night I had a dream… a visit from Mom. She was skipping through a classic English cottage garden where every flower was a word, gleefully picking as many blooms as she could carry. Happily rearranging them into sentences, poetry, each one visually and semantically beautiful and full of meaning. Delphiniums, foxglove, lavender, lupine, roses…in […]
Ever the planner, Dad bought a portable fire pit to extend the outdoor gathering season as we rounded the corner from summer into autumn, with no end to COVID in sight. It served us well on Thanksgiving — instead of our usual family gathering around the table (carefully set by Dad in recent years, using […]
I know Mom is somewhere, swimming in new depths, far from shore. It has been the kind of year where you need your mother*, and I am in dialogue with her often… imagining what she would say when someone tries to clip my wings or pull me under. These conversations, distilled from a lifetime of […]
One of the ways that we have been dealing with the slow, steady loss of Mom is by exploring how we can carry on her environmental activism work. If not for the Alzheimer’s, Mom would’ve spent her retirement days hunting morels and hiking with Dad up north, going on wildflower walks and swimming in Lake […]
A couple of years ago Mom’s DNA results (see DNA) prompted me to take advantage of Ancestry’s two week free trial access to their historical databases. I stayed up late all through that fortnight, devouring everything I could find about both sides of the family. We’ve always known more about Dad’s side of the family […]
It is hard for me to delete photos — excruciating, even. I love the almost infinite frames made possible by digital cameras as I try to immortalize an expression, catch the fading light. But deleting the many imperfect photos I’ve snapped feels too laborious when work and Jens and dinner are calling for my time. […]
Mom has so little left to lose now that it becomes hard to detect the decline. The hospice nurses have noted a recent downward trend in her blood pressure. What does this mean? We all race to google it. There was also another small infection. Little things — her smile muscles have all but gone […]
From each of our day ones, we saw love. Saw it grow and change and deepen with the challenges of life. Today marks 50 years since Mom and Dad wed, exchanging rings etched with the phrase through every spring. Though we weren’t there for all 50 years, we’ve had a front row seat for most of […]
We are living out strange days, these days at the tail end of a long goodbye. Time with Mom is simple, quiet, and full of sweet moments. Some days it feels almost normal, she’s been fading away for so long, and other times the grief is crushing. If I were a filmmaker maybe I could […]
Liz Swims 
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