What I posted on the FB Page:  Tribe of After


You are heard and companioned here. I know this is not a FB group that offers advice. However, I think it’s important that we share our struggles with each other. I will tell you my experience this week so that you know you are not alone. I had lunch with a colleague on Wednesday. She asked me lots of questions about Brendan’s accident and death. She was also a nurse. I needed to repeat my story as well. So I told her the whole thing from beginning to end. I showed her photos of Brendan in the ICU right after his accident, bandaged and bleeding. And the photos I took the whole week while he was in a coma and then pronounced dead. My last photo of me holding his hand. I didn’t realize that sharing this again would send me into a trauma.


I was set to visit my radiation oncologist for a check, a year after my cancer surgery and treatment. But while driving I felt I couldn’t breathe, that there was a heaviness in my chest. I was dizzy and not even sure I would make it to my appt. I thought I was having a heart attack. When I arrived, the nurses looked at me as I almost passed out, and knew that they had to get me to the hospital.. The hospital is right next to the doctors office so they put me in a wheelchair and wheeled me to the ER. They did a full checkup, EKG, blood tests etc, etc and everything was normal. They were convinced I was having a panic attack. The next day I went to my doctor and he increased my anti-depressant a little bit. I have to work everyday, and make money to support my children. As you know, It’s so difficult grieving and trying to get through life... Even after 8 months tomorrow that Brendan has died, I am still despondent. I keep a Blog about Brendan and my grief. I now have 200 entries with my artwork, photos of him, poetry, insights etc. It keeps me going. Writing, writing, writing…...Luckily our friend Megan offers this support. ,

Brendan: Sitting on the "Boy's" Gravestone.

Brendan sitting on Boy's Gravestone. In less than a year Brendan's friends, parents

 and I would be taking turns spreading his ashes in this exact location.

Found Poetry Dedicated To Brendan

Fishing....

Brendan's Secret Beach...short clip of me arranging a fossil shrine in his honor

Brendan's Garden: The Final Photo

Saturday, February 3, 2018; Just two days before he died, Brendan finally finished his garden. 

It had been after living one year at 314 Avalon St. 

I took these photos never realizing that by the 

next Saturday he would dead.

“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there.

It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Brendan had worked so hard to hook up the solar powered Christmas lights on his Jade Plant. I bought him the mushroom, starfish and eye ornaments to hang on it's branches.

Brendan's 42nd Birthday Card I Created. His Final Birthday On This Earth

“He died that day because his body had served its purpose. His soul had done what it came to do, learned what it came to learn, and then was free to leave.” 

― Garth Stein, The Art of Racing in the Rain

I took this little video of the Whoo & Brendan, Thanksgiving Day 2017

Those we love deeply...

"Those we love deeply who have died are part of our identity; they are a part of our biography. We feel that love in the marrow of our bones." by Joanne Cacciatore~~'Bearing the Unbearable: Love, Loss, and the Heartbreaking Path of Grief'.

You go with the loved thing or person that's going away. You follow it a far as you can go......

Photo of the "Boy" aka: Jackson. Beloved cat of Brendan (aka: dad) . Died April 15, 2017. 

Dad would die less than a year later.

“Grief reunites you with what you've lost. It's a merging; you go with the loved thing or person that's going away. You follow it a far as you can go.

But finally,the grief goes away and you phase back into the world. Without him.

And you can accept that. What the hell choice is there? You cry, you continue to cry, because you don't ever completely come back from where you went with him -- a fragment broken off your pulsing, pumping heart is there still. A cut that never heals.

And if, when it happens to you over and over again in life, too much of your heart does finally go away, then you can't feel grief any more. And then you yourself are ready to die. You'll walk up the inclined ladder and someone else will remain behind grieving for you.”
― Philip K. Dick, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

(insert photo: boy in white box --burying)

And so you haunt me. Always with me, you are the invisible diner at our table, the constant presence that trails me as I go about my daily routine.... In the darkness of a closed-lidded world, you are alive and vital, unchanging, mine. You are the ghost of everything that once was lovely... a shadow casts its majesty over everything that remains... ~Samantha Bruce-Benjamin, The Art of Devotion
Sculpture: The Abyss (1909) - Pietro Canonica

When You Really Love Someone....

Found Poetry: Thinking of Brendan

Favorite Post of Dozens of Friends by Rainer Maria Rilke

From the Poet Rainer Maria Rilke dated: August 1, 1918 to his friend Sidonie Nadherny von Borutin, whose brother died suddenly:

".....You have to keep moving, you have to return to the things that had been his, you have to lay hand on your lost one's things that are also yours due to such complex relations and attractions. This might be the mission assigned to you by this incomprehensible fate. You have to continue his life within your life to the extent that it had not been completed; his life has now passed over to yours and you who truly knew him, can move forwards quite as he intended; make this the task of your mourning, to explore what he expected of you, hoped for you, wished would happen to you. If I could convince you, my friend, that his influence has not left your existence. ......Now especially he is here, and now he has all the freedom to be here and we have all the freedom to feel him. Do not believe that anything that is part of our true realities could disappear or cease to exist."

And the beauty of the song goes on.....

“we are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. as we were. as we are no longer. as we will one day not be at all.”

― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

Telling the Story of Loss Again & Again

“When one person is missing the whole world seems empty.”
― Pat Schweibert, Tear Soup: A Recipe for Healing After Loss

“And if one day,' she said, really crying now, 'you look back and you feel bad for being so angry, if you feel bad for being so angry at me that you couldn't even speak to me, then you have to know, Conor, you have to that is was okay. It was okay. That I knew. I know, okay? I know everything you need to tell me without you having to say it out loud.”
― Patrick Ness, A Monster Calls


“The whole world can become the enemy when you lose what you love.”

― Kristina McMorris, Bridge of Scarlet Leaves


“But when ye come, and all the flowers are dying,

If I am dead, as dead I well may be,

You'll come and find the place where I am lying,

And kneel and say Ave there for me,

And I shall hear, though soft you tread above me,

And all my grave will warmer, sweeter be,

For you will bend and tell me that you love me,

And I shall sleep in peace until you come to me”

― Frederic Weatherly

He Is The Most Beautiful Creature I Have Ever Seen......

“He is the most beautiful creature I have ever seen and it's not about his face, but the life force I can see in him. It's the smile and the pure promise of everything he has to offer. Like he's saying, 'Here I am world, are you ready for so much passion and beauty and goodness and love and every other word that should be in the dictionary under the word life?' Except this boy is dead, and the unnaturalness of it makes me want to pull my hair out with Tate and Narnie and Fitz and Jude's grief all combined. It makes me want to yell at the God that I wish I didn't believe in. For hogging him all to himself. I want to say, 'You greedy God. Give him back. I needed him here.”
― Melina Marchetta, On the Jellicoe Road

The reality is that you will grieve forever

“The reality is that you will grieve forever. You will not ‘get over’ the loss of a loved one; you will learn to live with it. You will heal and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered. You will be whole again but you will never be the same. Nor should you be the same nor would you want to.”
― Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and David Kessle

“But when I do feel all the strength go out of me, and I fall to my knees beside the table and I think I cry, then, or at least I want to, and everything inside me screams for just one more kiss, one more word, one more glance, one more.”
― Veronica Roth, Allegiant

“Deep grief sometimes is almost like a specific location, a coordinate on a map of time. When you are standing in that forest of sorrow, you cannot imagine that you could ever find your way to a better place. But if someone can assure you that they themselves have stood in that same place, and now have moved on, sometimes this will bring hope”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“It doesn't get better," I said. "The pain. The wounds scab over and you don't always feel like a knife is slashing through you. But when you least expect it, the pain flashes to remind you you'll never be the same.”
― Katie McGarry, Pushing the Limits

“When you part from your friend, you grieve not;
For that which you love most in him may be clearer in his absence, as
the mountain to the climber is clearer from the plain.”
― Khalil Gibran, The Prophet

“In time, in time they tell me, I'll not feel so bad. I don't want time to heal me. There's a reason I'm like this.
I want time to set me ugly and knotted with loss of you, marking me. I won't smooth you away.
I can't say goodbye.”
― China Miéville, The Scar

“Dying is overrated. Human sentimentality has twisted it into the ultimate act of love. Biggest load of bullshit in the world. Dying for someone isn't the hard thing. The man that dies escapes. Plain and simple. Game over. End of pain...Try living for someone. Through it all-good, bad, thick, thin, joy, suffering. That's the hard thing.”
― Karen Marie Moning, Shadowfever


“Without you in my arms, I feel an emptiness in my soul. I find myself searching the crowds for your face - I know it's an impossibility, but I cannot help myself.”
― Nicholas Sparks, Message in a Bottle

“They say time heals all wounds, but that presumes the source of the grief is finite”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Prince

“So it’s true, when all is said and done, grief is the price we pay for love.”
― E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly,

“It is useless for me to describe to you how terrible Violet, Klaus, and even Sunny felt in the time that followed. If you have ever lost someone very important to you, then you already know how it feels, and if you haven't, you cannot possibly imagine it.”
― Lemony Snicket, The Bad Beginning

“He died that day because his body had served its purpose. His soul had done what it came to do, learned what it came to learn, and then was free to leave.”
― Garth Stein, The Art of Racing in the Rain

“Do you not know that a man is not dead while his name is still spoken?”
― Terry Pratchett, Going Postal

“Because God is never cruel, there is a reason for all things. We must know the pain of loss; because if we never knew it, we would have no compassion for others, and we would become monsters of self-regard, creatures of unalloyed self-interest. The terrible pain of loss teaches humility to our prideful kind, has the power to soften uncaring hearts, to make a better person of a good one.”
― Dean Koontz, The Darkest Evening of the Year

“From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: that we are here for the sake of each other - above all for those upon whose smile and well-being our own happiness depends, and also for the countless unknown souls with whose fate we are connected by a bond of sympathy. Many times a day I realize how much my own outer and inner life is built upon the labors of my fellow men, both living and dead, and how earnestly I must exert myself in order to give in return as much as I have received.”
― Albert Einstein

“I felt the unfairness of it, the inarguable injustice of loving someone who might have loved you back but can't due to deadness.”

― John Green, Looking for Alaska

If I die, I Will Wait For You

“If I die, I will wait for you, do you understand? No matter how long. I will watch from beyond to make sure you live every year you have to its fullest, and then we’ll have so much to talk about when I see you again… (Bones)”

― Jeaniene Frost

“Fear not death for the sooner we die, the longer we shall be immortal.”

― Benjamin Franklin



“The heaviness of loss in her heart hadn't eased, but there was room there for humour, too.”

― Nalo Hopkinson, Brown Girl in the Ring



“Mostly it is loss which teaches us about the worth of things.”

― Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena



“Though lovers be lost, love shall not; And death shall have no dominion.”

― Dylan Thomas


“No truth can cure the sorrow we feel from losing a loved one. No truth, no sincerity, no strength, no kindness can cure that sorrow. All we can do is see it through to the end and learn something from it, but what we learn will be no help in facing the next sorrow that comes to us without warning.”

― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

To Live in Hearts We Leave Behind Is Not To Die

“To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die.”

― Thomas Campbell


“The dead can survive as part of the lives of those that still live.”

― Kenzaburō Ōe, Hiroshima Notes


“Your mother died to save you. If there is one thing Voldemort cannot understand, it is love. Love as powerful as your mother's for you leaves it's own mark. To have been loved so deeply, even though the person who loved us is gone, will give us some protection forever.”

― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone


“My sister will die over and over again for the rest of my life. Grief is forever. It doesn't go away; it becomes a part of you, step for step, breath for breath. I will never stop grieving Bailey because I will never stop loving her. That's just how it is. Grief and love are conjoined, you don't get one without the other. All I can do is love her, and love the world, emulate her by living with daring and spirit and joy.”

― Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere

Cats Are Nice

“I meant," said Ipslore bitterly, "what is there in this world that truly makes living worthwhile?"
Death thought about it.
CATS, he said eventually. CATS ARE NICE.”
― Terry Pratchett, Sourcery

Whooskins next to the snow globe I made Brendan for Christmas 2017

The Idea of Someone Being Gone

“That was the thing. You never got used to it, the idea of someone being gone. Just when you think it's reconciled, accepted, someone points it out to you, and it just hits you all over again, that shocking.”

― Sarah Dessen, The Truth About Forever

“Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming "Wow! What a Ride!”

― Hunter S. Thompson, The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967

All the World Will Be In Love With Night...........

“When he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.”
― William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

The death of a loved one......

“It is a curious thing, the death of a loved one. We all know that our time in this world is limited, and that eventually all of us will end up underneath some sheet, never to wake up. And yet it is always a surprise when it happens to someone we know. It is like walking up the stairs to your bedroom in the dark, and thinking there is one more stair than there is. Your foot falls down, through the air, and there is a sickly moment of dark surprise as you try and readjust the way you thought of things.”
― Lemony Snicket, Horseradish

I Do Not Care How Long Time Passes

I do not care how long time passes.
Spiders can build webs all around me,
moss can grow around my feet
and vines can enclose my body.
I will live forward with your memory.
I will always love you,
I will never forget you.

Finally....A Poet That Understands: Rainer Maria Rilke

From the Poet Rainer Maria Rilke dated: August 1, 1918 to his friend Sidonie Nadherny von Borutin, whose brother died suddenly:

".....You have to keep moving, you have to return to the things that had been his, you have to lay hand on your lost one's things that are also yours due to such complex relations and attractions. This might be the mission assigned to you by this incomprehensible fate. You have to continue his life within your life to the extent that it had not been completed; his life has now passed over to yours and you who truly knew him, can move forwards quite as he intended; make this the task of your mourning, to explore what he expected of you, hoped for you, wished would happen to you. If I could convince you, my friend, that his influence has not left your existence. ......Now especially he is here, and now he has all the freedom to be here and we have all the freedom to feel him. Do not believe that anything that is part of our true realities could disappear or cease to exist."