About Tiny Ferocious Things

By: Molly Senecal October 11, 2019October 24, 2019 UncategorizedAbout, featured, grief, loss, suicide3 Comments

You will break. But oh, you will also heal. Molly Senecal writes on grief, suicide, loss, and social issues impacting women. Her works include a variety of writing styles from flash nonfiction, poetry, essays, and reaction pieces. As a deaf woman, she draws from the extraordinarily descriptive and conceptual nature of sign language to color…

Nepantla

By: Molly Senecal December 1, 2020December 1, 2020

Poetry and Prosenepantla, poetry3 Comments

There is so much space between those two words – she died – how is it that the entire universe can be contained within that slip of space?

Too

By: Molly Senecal April 11, 2020April 11, 2020

Poetry and Prosebody image, grief, suicide5 Comments

Three letters with the power to destroy, to annihilate, to burn everything down. Too These three letters can throw the scale off balance, topple the house of cards, bring the whole damn thing down. You shake your head; I see you disagree with me. Bear with me, stay with me for a moment. Let me…

A Wish For Next Year

By: Molly Senecal December 30, 2019December 30, 2019

Poetry and Prose, Uncategorizedchild loss, grief, holidays with loss, new year without my child, suicideLeave a Comment

I wish for the impossible, for the faraway lifetime that ended years ago. I wish that the earth, soft with winter rain, would feel your feet — wide and solid — walk again through our garden. And that you would gather winter squash as you did before. I wish for one more brightly-lit dinner around…

The First Year – Navigating These Seasons When Your Child Has Died

By: Molly Senecal December 11, 2019December 11, 2019

Guest Postchild loss, Christmas, holidays, suicide3 Comments

Grief is a wilderness — sometimes I think I can see where I am supposed to go, but most of the time I can’t quite make out where the path is or how this will all settle down to something I can hold in my hands and say — ‘There. There is my loss and…

Helping Teenagers with the Death Of A Sibling

By: Molly Senecal November 16, 2019November 16, 2019

Guest PostChild Grief Awareness Month, suicideLeave a Comment

It’s November already. Almost one year since my youngest daughter died by suicide during her first semester away at college. Even as I write those words, I have to pause and let them wash over me as though they are new words, as if this is a new grief. I don’t think these words will…

Four Things Trail Running Taught Me About Living With Grief

By: Molly Senecal November 8, 2019

Uncategorized2 Comments

It was an early morning, and a couple of running friends and I set off for an easy run along our local trail. I started thinking about my daughter, who died suddenly last year, and about life, grief, and how things often don’t end up the way we expect them to. As my hips and…

The Impossible Month: The Anniversary of My Child’s Death

By: Molly Senecal November 1, 2019

Uncategorized2 Comments

November is the month of marigold petals, pungent and bold, of smoke, and bone-white daughter-grief. It is the month when the leaves bleed red. Where the sun — bleeding through the thick, suffocating smoke — casts a sickly yellow hue on all our faces. Where the words that you are dead bleed through my eyes…

Broken Pieces

By: Molly Senecal October 26, 2019October 26, 2019

Uncategorizeddepression, grief, loss, loss of daughter, suicide1 Comment

I think some people are born broken. There’s something about the way the pieces of their soul clatter and shift discordantly inside them from the day they arrive on this earth. Yes, I know there are glorious stories about broken people who were able to rise above the blackness to fit the pieces together, who…

The Floor is Lava

By: Molly Senecal October 18, 2019October 24, 2019

Uncategorizedcollege suicide, grief, profeta, suicide9 Comments

When my children were young, they loved to play ‘the floor is lava.’ The object of the game was to avoid touching the floor, or certain doom would befall the unlucky one – sudden death by invisible hot lava that flowed across our carpeted living room. I would watch them careen and leap from sofa…

photo of person holding umbrella near body of water

The Weight of Words

By: Molly Senecal October 14, 2019October 25, 2019

Uncategorizedloss of daughter, suicide3 Comments

Some words have more weight than others. This is a truth that my body did not understand until my daughter died. It doesn’t work the way you think it does. Growing up, your mother, or your father, or someone you trusted told you that words are just words. Brush them off, and move on, they…