Tag Archives: life
March 16, 2018 marks a very important day in my grieving journey. Why? At 0731 hours today, Kalei will have been dead as long as she lived. It might come as a surprise to people to learn I knew about this day a very long time ago. Shortly after Kalei was killed, I felt a need to know when this day, hour and minute would arrive. As to exactness of the end cessation of life, I feel obligated to insert…..
My grieving journey…from a different perspective
Every year at this time I begin the process of writing Kalei’s annual In Memoriam. As she will have been dead 15 years this August 20th, I find myself acknowledging another milestone. I don’t know why this is but for some reason increments of 5 and 10 feel BIGGER as far as her death anniversary date goes and this year is no different…15 feel REALLY BIG. Maybe that is why I found myself looking back at all the earlier memoriam submissions…something…..
In the previous two posts I talked about the importance of saying the names of the dead and giving the gift of listening to survivors. I am closing out this series by discussing the wrongness of saying “you were lucky” to survivors of horrific events. Whether the person involved walked away unscathed or sustained horrific injuries, we seem to want to assign their survival to luck or chance. Is mankind (or womankind) really that shallow, thoughtless or afraid to think about death long…..
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,…..
While I felt Kalei’s spirit leave this earth, she left in such an abrupt manner, the shock of it did not allow me to properly grasp the details of that occurrence…at least not in a way that gave me enough information to properly describe it. It was much different with my mom’s death. By the time early April 2015 rolled around, mom’s health was clearly failing. As it became more and more apparent that the end was near, I spoke to her about cancelling my upcoming trip to Maui but…..
The morning of January 23rd my friend Angela called to say she wanted to wish Kalei a happy birthday ‘in person’. She asked me I would drive out to the cemetery with her. As I had nothing planned until the evening, I replied, “Sure, I would love to take you! What time should I pick you up?” As we chatted about logistics, I realized this day might actually be the right time to deal with a crazy need-thought that had been nagging at me for the past month. For some reason,…..
Over the past few weeks I have been working on one of those blogs that decided ‘it’ had to written. I have learned not to fight the writing of those kinds of blogs — the words will nag at me night and day until I put pen to paper and post it. Only then am I am rewarded with peace of mind, and a much appreciated sense of accomplishment. Sometimes I am lucky enough to get out in front of them…the words are written and…..
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