Reaching for Eudaimonia

Running with him was as much a part of me as my bones or my heart. The day he died my heartbeat seemed to slow to a melody I didn't recognize. I kept trying to find the tempo, the exact moment my inner conductor decided to signal a molto ritardando.  I couldn't do it.  I was too slow to rewind myself backward. I was stuck in slow motion, moving from room to room with dragged feet and crumpled shirts. My body forgot what it felt like to hit the ground hard and confident, pushing against it to move forward.    I was used to my heartbeat being synchronized to his when we would race towards the finish line. Now that he was gone, who was I going to run next to? The couch became my coffin for a year. My eyes were constantly in motion, shifting from the television to our old cat that would stare out the window, wondering when he was going to come in from outside. I would have to tell her to come away. I would try to shelter her under the blankets and hold her ti...

Photo I took of Howard during the 2010 snowstorm. The storm came in quick and covered the forest in a thick blanket of snow. It shrouded the house and weighed down the branches. It went up past our ankles when we marched through it. Howard took out his camera to get some pictures of the house and the trails. We stopped periodically to make snow angels or have a snowball fight.  The rainy blizzard stuck to the silver hairs on his beard making him look like a snow giant. Mom's purple hat was slowly collecting snowflakes too. Both of their cheeks were stained pink. When we laughed our exhales were visible. "Mom, kiss Howard in the snow," I said. I took my own camera and began snapping as many photos as I possibly could. When it snowed over five inches the house ended up looking like something in a postcard or a wintery wonderland.  Photo I took of Momma and Howard during the 2010 snowstorm. Sometimes when we walked through the forest we would hear ...

Many people who I have shared this blog page with are aware that I am in a class for blogging. They usually ask me why I decided to take on such a personal topic for a class. My answer to this ranges from "Yeah, I guess it is kind of crazy" or "My advisors made me do it." The latter is obviously meant as a joke, but they really did have an influence in my decision.  In reality I didn't know at the beginning what I would learn from writing about all of this. I didn't know what it would feel like to share such personal details of my life with friends and strangers.  The overall feeling I have about posting is relief.  I went back to the start of this whole blog decision and I looked at some of my earliest posts. It is there that I see the hesitation in my writing, which I eventually ended up writing about (Thanks, Mom).  I think everyone could tell that I was very unsure at the beginning. I think they knew that I had become accustomed to keeping this p...

Grief will find and affect us all one way or another.   For me, the inevitability of that statement was disturbingly profound.  Researching grief and coping mechanisms felt like wading through a pool of murky water. I first started out looking for blogs like mine that talked about a specific loss. Most of the blogs I found I couldn’t relate to because a lot of them were about spouses or people who lost their parents later in life. I then moved on to watching Ted Talks to see what some of their speakers were saying about grief.  I even searched the self-help section of Barnes and Noble for information.  What I did find got me meditating on an assumption that grief can be very reliant on culture. Thus begging the question: If culture really is a independent factor, how are we supposed to grieve? When I started researching grief I found there were some cultures out there that, in a way, celebrated the end of life—one with jazz music. An article on ...