Tag Archives: gifts
It seems I am destined to live a life sharing my inside voice with the world. Sigh…no matter how hard I try to keep those darn words locked up safely where they belong, escape seems inevitable. While I blame some of this habit on living alone (and no all you Mr., Ms. Mrs., etc. etc. Smarty Pants, I am not losing it! I have no invisible friends sitting at the other side of the table…harrumph!!) it really is personality based……
Two years ago today Kalei’s Grandma Helen died — she was 88 years old. She had a good life. She had a long life. She was fortunate to be healthy for most of those 88 years. It was only in the past couple of years that she began to struggle. She wasn’t in pain, but ever so slowly her lungs were filling up with scar tissue which, in time, made breathing more and more difficult. Her illness did not really…..
Two unimaginable events taught me how important it was to let the survivors of those events tell their story. Just like I did, they too need to tell and re-tell their experience in order to learn how to turn their unimaginable experience into an imaginable one. One boy survived the crash that killed Kalei. A couple of months after her death one of his friends phoned me and said, “Lorene, are you mad at Jared?” “Of course not” I replied,…..
My Introduction to Hiking – A Lifetime Ahead Story
The hard physical work of raising cattle and working on a grain farm — well into my adult years — kept me active and physically fit. Even in my youth, outside of participating in every sport available in our rural community, the thought of exercising just for the sake of it never entered my mind because at the end of each day my body was tired…I did not need to do crunches or yoga or hike for miles on top of…..
I must start this blog with an assurance …unless you are forced into an unimaginable event; your brain will never allow you to really understand. But that mental limitation does not mean you cannot still add to your knowledge of this kind of life experience. If you are bold enough to try, this blog will not only help those looking at the unimaginable from the inside out, but the people whose viewpoint is from the far safer outside looking in perspective. As mentioned in the book, we humans are…..
Every now and then someone will say to me, “When you wrote and published Forever Kalei’s Mom, you took something bad — her death — and turned it into something good.” While I might not totally subscribe to the accuracy of that statement (it implies a conscious plan, and the book was anything but that), I appreciate the meaning behind their words. For me, the something of value (sorry, I just can’t use good) comes from the sum of three things: Kalei’s life, her death and the grief…..
This may come as a surprise to those of you who only know me through my book or blog, but I can actually be a person of few words. There are many times when I think that a picture does in fact speak louder than words. When I look at the following images, I feel like they clearly portray the three lifetimes I have incorporated into my world. While there is sorrow, I also see the beauty and wonder in each and every…..
The second Christmas after Kalei died, I wrote the following on Kalei’s forum. To those who did not have the opportunity to follow those posts, I would refer to Kalei’s gravesite as her ‘room’ in my stories. This is what I wrote on December 1, 2002… Last year I could not face Christmas, so I just pretended there was no such thing as a holiday season. I told my mind to treat it like any other day of the year…..
One of the biggest challenges I faced when writing Forever Kalei’s Mom was coming up with effective words to illustrate the unimaginable emotions and thoughts associated with grief. That same challenge was present when it came to explaining to my support system what I needed and did not need when it came to regular universe event days such as my birthday. What worked in my Lifetime Ago did not fit in my new world and different life but I was helpless to explain that. My 50th birthday (Chapter 22) is a perfect example of how…..
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