Tag: Loss & Grief
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Musings on My Mother’s 98th Birthday
Saturday, October 17, 2026 – Orlando, Florida “I can pinpoint that as the single happiest moment of my life, because I realized then that Mom would always have my back. It made me feel giant. I raced back down the concrete ramp, faster than I ever had before, so fast I should have fallen, but…
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More October Reveries
Friday, October 16, 2026 – Orlando, Florida Tomorrow would have been my mom’s 98th birthday. My feelings about that are, well, complicated. She died 11 years ago in the South Florida townhouse we had called home for more than 37 years, after a long and painful struggle with dementia, depression, kidney problems, and the other…
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The Last Smile
Afternoon, Friday, July 18, 2025, Miami, Florida “Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speakknits up the o-er wrought heart and bids it break.”― William Shakespeare, Macbeth Today isn’t a good day—not because it’s a “sad anniversary” sort of day, though it is that too—but because daily life feels unusually heavy. I’m overwhelmed by…
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School, 1972 (Heartsong): Haiku # 10
Afternoon’s cold light Songs played in melancholic keys Remind me of you
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2,557 Days Redux
2,557 days. That’s how many days have passed since my mother, Beatriz Diaz-Granados, died at the age of 86 from a combination of age-related illnesses, including dementia, heart issues, and the effects of being confined to bed for half a decade after back surgery. She died around five in the morning; I’m sure the death…
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2,557 Days
2,557 days. That’s how many days have passed since I last heard my mother say my name before she drifted off to an uneasy sleep on the afternoon of July 18, 2015 after I gave her a dose of tramadol to ease the pain in her back that she complained about not long after our…