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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
You will break. But oh, you will also heal. Molly Senecal writes on grief, suicide, loss, and social issues. 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 her work.…
Read More