When Life Gives You Snow Storms…

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For the last few months I’ve been planning a book tour in my home province of Newfoundland, Canada. I always knew this was risky in March. In fact, for weeks I’ve been joking about a snowstorm coming on March 8 – the day that I was slated to fly. I admit I’m accustomed to worrying about the worst. I kept thinking: “Yup, there will be a snowstorm the weekend of my launch events, guaranteed.” And then there was! But even my worry-wart nature couldn’t have guessed the level of storm that would come. It brought EIGHTY CENTIMETRES OF SNOW. The doorways are drifted over and at one point they took the plows themselves off the road for safety.

My book signing was cancelled yesterday but I held out hope for my workshop and official launch today to still happen. But when we woke to even more snow and drifts the size of cars to dig out, we knew it wasn’t happening.

I’ve said quite a few times: “I cannot believe this is happening on the one weekend I really needed this not to happen.” Even though I kept bracing myself for it, it still feels frustrating and annoying. I’m disappointed that things didn’t go the way I wanted.

AND

Sometimes life brings you snowstorms. Sometimes really really big ones. The truth is that there are so many times life doesn’t go the way we want. Our best laid plans fall apart. Our good intentions fall flat. The things we really hoped for don’t come to be, and the things we really didn’t want to happen happened anyway.

A friend who lost a brother to cancer far too young said to me when I first lost my sister: “One of the hardest things I lost after my brother died was my ability to believe everything will always turn out okay.” I felt that one deep in my bones. That is earth shaking when someone dies. It’s hard to accept that we can’t will, vibe or pray things into always going the way we want. Life brings much we don’t want. We can’t control cancer or snowstorms, and that stinks.

So we make space for life to go in new directions when the one we were taking let us down. Which is why I’ve done some editing to my tour, and I hope to see those of you who live in Newfoundland tomorrow for my revised launch time. And for today, I’m enjoying extra time with my niece over a movie marathon and lots of storm chips. It’s different than I pictured and it’s so good.

Newfoundland Book Tour

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One of the things that I knew I absolutely had to do when this book came out was bring it back “home” to Newfoundland – my family home, and the home where Roxanne lived and died.

I have been incredibly moved by the response to this book by my home province. I’m excited to see old friends and meet new ones as I join in these various events.

All are welcome, so feel free to share with those you know on “the rock” who may need some “Grieving Room.”

There are Grievers All Around Us

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A couple of days ago I finally got a chance to go to our local Indigo (the Canadian equivalent of Barnes and Noble) and it was definitely special to see my book on the shelf. But what was even more special was what happened when I got talking to one of the staff close by.

She asked about my book and when I said the title her eyes welled up and I knew. We recognize each other don’t we, grievers? We can tell when we have met someone who has had to learn to give grief room. “My husband died 7 years ago,” she said. “Colon cancer.” His name was Kevin.

We talked about loss and grief and she was excited to read my book. She said she’s always trying to find books to add to her collection because they still help her but also so she can share them with her sons who lost a dad too young. “It never goes away,” she said. I showed her my chapter called “Room to never get over it” and the tears welled up again in her eyes. She nodded knowingly and said “Exactly.”

I thought I was going to have a fun moment of seeing my books on a major store’s book shelves, which was great. But these types of things are what really make me thankful. There are so many people carrying grief all around us. They’re bagging our groceries, driving our ubers, smiling at us as we walk down the road.

They’re stocking shelves at an Indigo on a Thursday night.

When I left this woman said “We were meant to meet tonight. This was meant to be.” She was so thankful to have that moment to give her grief room.

May you find room for your grief too, dear griever. Whether it be through this book, or this page, or another book, or another page, or a random stranger you meet in a store. Grieving Room is important. 

“Use the Plate:” What My Sister Taught Me About Not Taking Life for Granted

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I was getting ready for my book launch early this week and pulling all the big serving plates out of the cupboards. Then I remembered this one, which is stored waaaay back in my “things that break easy” cupboard on the top of the refrigerator that takes me standing on a chair to reach. It’s so pretty isn’t it? My husband and I bought it twenty years ago in Turkey and I’ve always been really careful with it.

“Should I use it today?” I wondered. Then I remembered a story. My sister Roxanne was visiting and I took out the plate to show her because I knew she would love it. She loved beautiful things. Then she asked why it was in a cupboard. “I’m afraid it will get chipped,” I told her. Then she said: “If I owned that I’d have it out on my coffee table where I could see it every day. Why keep beautiful things in a cupboard?”

And I knew she would. She put new clothes on the minute she bought them. She used her china all the time. She ate the Christmas Chocolates before they had a chance to get stale. She would definitely put the plate out where she could see it all the time.

Roxanne taught me a lot of lessons like this: to not take things for granted, to appreciate beauty whenever you see it, to cherish life and the joys it brings. She lived in the shadow of cancer for eight years and always reminded us to enjoy every sweet gift life had to offer, that we don’t need to wait for special moments to enjoy precious things because all of life is special.

So I used this plate to serve some delicious donuts at my book launch because beautiful things don’t need to be protected in cupboards. Let the beauty out. Celebrate. Let the chips come. Because life is short.

Use the plate.

On Launch Day

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I’ve wondered what to share on this day that “Grieving Room” officially launches into the world. Nothing felt quite right. Of course there is much to celebrate – and I do. But it is also a weird reality to celebrate a book that has a story I never wish had happened: the death of my sister.

As I thought about what to write, I found myself thinking back to eleven years ago and feeling a similar feeling for very different reasons. I was getting ready to go visit Roxanne in Newfoundland, and all of our siblings were going to meet at her place for a brother/sister weekend. Roxanne’s cancer was rapidly progressing, and while she was going to try one more “last ditch” treatment, the odds of it making any difference were very low. We were gathering to be together with our sister while she was still well enough to enjoy it. We were all pushing it out of our minds, but the countdown to her last days was already on.

The days leading up to that trip felt heavy for me. I wasn’t sure what to pack, what to plan, what to prepare. Roxanne had made it clear she didn’t want the visit to be morbid, and we had agreed. We would focus on enjoying being together. Then it occurred to me – Roxanne’s birthday was just a few days after I would return home. I needed to get her a birthday present.

And, again, nothing felt right.

I remember walking up and down a street of gift shops in Hamilton, thinking: “What do you buy for a dying woman that you are all pretending for a few days is not dying?” I couldn’t get anything too sentimental. She’d made her feelings clear about that. And I didn’t want to get her anything to do with her being sick – no cozy slippers, soothing teas or snuggly blankets. I went from store to store to store and nothing made sense.

You know what I ended up getting her? A reusable mesh shopping bag. You read that right. My last gift to Roxanne was a reusable mesh shopping bag. Because it had nothing to do with her being sick. And it had nothing to do with saying goodbye. And it had nothing to do with pretty much anything. It was a just a bag that I thought she’d like – and she did. I still remember the relief on her face when she opened it and saw that it was a gift that required no emotional response from her.

I thought of that bag today when I didn’t know what to post. Sometimes nothing feels quite right. Sometimes you end up with a mesh shopping bag because there’s no gift that could possibly be the perfect “last gift” you give to your dying sister. You’ll always want another gift. You’ll always have more to say. You’ll never be able to wrap up all your love and fit it in a gift box.

So I decided to give up on the “right” post for the release of “Grieving Room.” I wanted to find the perfect post to honour Roxanne in the midst of all this book sharing, but I couldn’t find it. This post is the post version of a mesh shopping bag.

I’ll just say that I’m thankful I got to write this book, and thankful someone published it. I’m grateful for all the support I have received, and I’m hopeful that this book will make a difference to anyone grieving. And I wish that my first book could have been about just about any other story than learning to grieve Roxanne’s death. I wish she was still here. I wish my first book could have been one she got to cheer for instead of star in. I wish she could know that her life mattered and her legacy continued.

Mostly, I wish I could grab that mesh bag and go shopping with Roxanne one more time. We would have had so much fun picking out what to wear to the book launch…

On the Dedication

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As I was getting ready to send in the final draft of Grieving Room, I finally got to write a page I had long been thinking about: The Dedication. Of course, I always assumed I would simply dedicate the book to the memory of Roxanne, my sister whose lose taught me so much about grief. If you’d asked me ten years ago who I’d dedicate ANY book too, my answer would have been simple: To Roxanne. Who else?

But from the time that Roxanne died to the time I sent a book to a publisher, some things had changed. Loss didn’t end with my sister. In fact, four of my cousins died of cancer after my sister. FOUR. What is even more tragic is that three of them were from the same family.

You read that right. When you look at the dedication, you’ll see three women listed with the maiden name Caines. These were three of my cousins who were born to my mother’s sister Mona. Aunt Mona was just the BEST. She was the youngest of my mom’s four sisters in their large family of eleven and she was always the life of the party. Aunt Mona died of cancer a couple of years before my sister died. Our “Porter Parties” have never been quite the same.

Then a couple of years after Roxanne died, Aunt Mona’s youngest daughter, Andrea got breast cancer – and died. She was 34. Then, as I was finishing up the book and trying to find a publisher, Aunt Mona’s second daughter, Stephanie, died of breast cancer. She was in her mid forties and left four children. A year and half later, my book sold and I took a picture of the contract just the day after a long overdue family reunion where I saw Aunt Mona’s oldest daughter, Dana and her two teenaged children, for the first time in a couple of decades (she had moved across the country many years before). Just two months later, Dana died of breast cancer too. When I got the news of her death at work, I put my head into my arms and sobbed and sobbed. I couldn’t believe Aunt Mona and all her children were gone.

We lost another cousin around that time as well, on my father’s side. Her name was Christine, and Christine had been a huge supporter of my writing. She also lived far from me, but one day I got a package in the mail from Christine. She sent me a beautiful journal, telling me to keep writing and to write about my sister. She shared that she loved my blog and felt I had a message to share with the world. How could I not dedicate this book to her? It felt so special to hear this from my cousin Christine.

I am going to be honest – I hadn’t been close to these cousins for many years. We were spread apart and our lives had gone in many different directions. But they were family, my beloved aunts’ children, my mother and father’s nieces. My cousins.

When I wrote the dedication, I thought of these five women of my family line: four cousins and my sister. We grew up together. I swam with the Caines girls in their swimming pool each summer. Christine was the lifeguard the day I got caught in a rope on the water slide at our local pool and she pulled me out of the water. These women were the familiar faces at the family potlucks, the brides at whose weddings I danced, the hugs shared at our grandparents funerals. They were the names in family updates from my mom and people I prayed for when they got sick.

Grief is funny. I didn’t feel entitled to too much grief when my cousins died. I often felt I had to preface telling people about their deaths by saying they lived far away, that we weren’t in touch a lot as adults, that my grief was for my extended family perhaps more than myself. But the grief was real, and grief needs room. I wanted to honour it.

My dedication is a small thing. But it is my way of saying that these women mattered to me. That cancer sucks. That I wish they had had more years and that I could have shared more time with them. To most they will just be strangers names on a page. But to me and the people who knew and loved them: they are missing pieces of our hearts.

You will have your own names. They won’t all get dedications in a book. But their lives matter no less. I hope this book will remind you that your memories of them, and the grief you carry for their loss, deserves room. This book goes out to all of them, and all the grievers who remember.

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The Complicated Excitement of a Book About Grief

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Yesterday, the advanced copies of my book arrived – 50 bound texts of my own words, with my name on the front and my picture on the inside. In hardcover! (If you’re a book nerd like me, you will get why it feels especially thrilling to have a hardcover book). It was definitely exciting. This book has been several years in the making, and there were times that it felt like actually holding this thing would never really happen. Yesterday it did – and I’m thankful.

AND.

It’s weird to feel too excited when you publish a book like this one. “Hey! Here’s a book that details the death of my sister and the worst year of my life that followed!” Writing this book was emotionally draining. I wrote it seven years after my sister’s death, and each day when I’d sit to write it felt like taking a band-aid off a wound and slicing it open again. Holding that same book was beautiful but emotional. There’s a story in it I wish I didn’t have to tell. I would have preferred if this story had not been mine. It feels a bit complicated to celebrate getting to tell it.

So I don’t rejoice about the story I’m telling. What I celebrate – or rather, embrace with gratitude – is the chance to share something that I believe will help people make space for their grief. When I went through loss, it took me a while to learn that I didn’t need to figure out how to fix my grief. Oh, I tried. Trust. I looked to any plan, book, or system to make things better. I girded myself up and I pushed my feelings down. I projected strength and worked hard to be “good” at grief (which to me meant minimal crying, offering sage reflections, and generally being able to cope with life each day). None of it worked, of course. My grief didn’t need fixing – it needed room.

My story is not even the slightest bit unique. In fact, I tell many stories besides my own in my book of people with whom I’ve journeyed through loss. Grief is everywhere. It is the universal heartbreak that shocks everyone of us. I wrote this book with the hope that it would help anyone facing loss to know their grief is valid. I hope it will, indeed, create “Grieving Room” for people who need it.

When you see my smile in this picture, know that that is what I am celebrating.

“Grieving Room: Making Space for All the Hard Things After Death and Loss” releases February 6, 2024. You can preorder now at:

Canada: https://www.amazon.ca/Grieving-Room-Making-Space-Things/dp/1506492371/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1MLMSNSMGN31F&keywords=grieving+room&qid=1704285836&sprefix=grieving+room%2Caps%2C110&sr=8-1

Outside Canada: https://www.amazon.com/Grieving-Room-Making-Space-Things/dp/1506492371/ref=sr_1_1?crid=ISAU5EJ5QB3S&keywords=grieving+room&qid=1704285890&sprefix=grieving+room%2Caps%2C110&sr=8-1

https://www.broadleafbooks.com/store/product/9781506492377/Grieving-Room

“Grieving Room” is Coming

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I’m excited to announce that my book “Grieving Room: Making Space for All the Hard Things After Death and Loss” will be released February 6, 2024, through Broadleaf Books.

The message of this book matters deeply to me. Grief is hard, and in my many years as a grief support person, I have yet to meet anyone who doesn’t feel like their grief doesn’t quite fit in a culture that is eager to move past hard things. Once the funeral and early days of grief have passed, most grievers feel isolated and out of step with the world around them. Lots of people are eager to fix, or solve, or change their grief – many find it difficult to simply give their grief room.

This book is a message to grievers to assure them that all the ways their grief needs room matters. It is also meant to help all of us learn how to give “grieving room” to others, who need space in their lives to mourn.

Keep checking in here for updates on purchasing information and special events.

I’m Done With Covid-Optimism…

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My Friends, I can’t do it anymore.

I simply don’t have it in me to be optimistic about covid.

I’ve tried, like lots of you, for nearly two years. Early on, my optimism knew no bounds. It sounded like: “We can do this for three weeks. We GOT this.”

“We’ll be back to normal by the summer.”

“It’s hard to miss Thanksgiving, but think how great Christmas will be!”

Then we entered year two, and I kept trying!

“This is the last lockdown for SURE.” “I think we’ll really turn a corner in the fall.”

“We are definitely done with online school…”

For church, I held on to the optimism that our in person gatherings would resume easily, and all of us would gather again with heartfelt hugs and joyous relief. For my kids, I assured them that their favourite things would be back soon: birthday parties would return, friends would come for sleepovers, cohorts and quad-mesters would be a thing of the past.

I tried to stay optimistic that hard work and “hanging in there” would get us to the other side. Our church would stay connected if we just kept sending care packages and I phoned enough people in a week. Any tensions or hard feelings that people have felt with people they love would abate if we just hung in there until people could see each other in person. Businesses could recover if we showed a surge of support when they reopened.

You guys, I’ve tried optimism for a long time. I’ve tried getting through this by trusting that everything will end up a certain way – the way that I want. But I’m realizing that it’s time for me to stop leaning on optimism. I’m trading in my optimism for something far more reliable: Hope.

Hope is a little different than optimism. Optimism is the idea that everything will work out in the way that I want. Optimism is the belief that I can “think positive” my way out of real difficulties. I’m not saying optimism doesn’t have a place. I’m saying that in this pandemic – it ain’t working for me anymore.

I no longer feel able to simply think “things will change soon.” I’ve thought that a lot, and, while it may be the case, it may not. Restrictions may continue. Variants may surge. Covid is nothing if not defiant of my expectations of it.

And, after nearly two years of this, the truth is that things won’t ever be like they were pre-pandemic. There WILL be people who have not stayed connected to our church. My kids HAVE been deeply impacted by the chaos of the last 22 months. And many of the broken relationships coming out of this season won’t be smoothed over by an in person hug. I can’t throw a positive attitude at these realities anymore as a way to get me through. What I can do is HOPE.

I can HOPE (and I do) that God is still with us. I can HOPE that God will guide us when we seek to heal and rebuild our lives again. I can HOPE that out of times of suffering can come seasons of new birth. Blindly believing that everything will come back in the way I want is not what I need to do right now. I don’t need optimism. I need hope. For two years, my optimism has not panned out. But for 44 years, hope has never disappointed.

I can’t help but get real Jesus-y here and go to a Bible passage from the book of Romans that reads: “We also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not put us to shame…”

I still look forward to the other side of this pandemic, but I don’t know what it will look like. I know there will be a lot of healing to be done. I know there will be changes to process. I know we will not be the same people that we were in early March, 2020. And I hope.

I hope for what we will become and what we can still be. This hope will not put us to shame. It cannot be undone by a new covid announcement or another variant or a social media debate that goes off the rails. If you have also lost your covid optimism today, I pray that you will find covid HOPE.

Optimism has its place. But we will always need hope to fill in the gaps optimism leaves blank. May hope fill the spaces our optimism couldn’t cover.