Thanksgiving Peace
I have never forgotten the pain of that first Thanksgiving without my sister Denise, the same one that was also our first without my maternal grandmother who had died just about six weeks before the holiday.
It was awkward; we all knew it was different. We got through it and in the ensuing years, as I began to speak publicly about suicide and grief, I also began to incorporate ways to not just survive the holiday season, but also make them meaningful, especially those first years without a loved one.
Within a family, each of us have a different story relating to our loved one, our relationship with them, and their death. That often means that when a holiday arrives, some family members are afraid to bring up the person and/or the loss while others want to talk about it.
To not speak of that person, makes it appear as if they never existed. But there might be too much pain for some people to speak of them. It’s important to find a place in the middle to meet.
I have heard of families who set a place at that table for that person; an acknowledgment that they still have a place in the family (as they do– and always will– no one can take away the memories you have with that person).
Through the years of speaking, I came to realize that a lit candle early in the day is a good way to diffuse that tension between family members. It’s a way of acknowledging the presence in some way of the deceased loved one, to remember that they are still part of the family, and a way that doesn’t mean everyone has to speak of them if it’s too painful.
I know many people are approaching their first holiday season without someone they love very much. No matter what road you are traveling in your life this Thanksgiving, may the day bring you peace and hope. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.
People We Call Family
My neighbor Basil used to say that sometimes the people who treat you better in life are the people who aren’t really your family. My friend LaRita told me once that she considered me her daughter, but that it was good we weren’t really related because that meant we would argue less.
People we call family.
When I worked on my doctorate in family studies, I became aware that this concept had a name- that sometimes in life we have people we aren’t biologically related to, but we call family.
LaRita Archibald quickly became one of those people the summer of 1993 when I was interning at USA Boxing at the United State Olympic Training Center. My sister Denise had just died a few months before and in the phone book I found the number for a local group of suicide survivors (what we now call the suicide bereaved).
It was LaRita’s number that I would be calling, the same message that stayed in her phone for what seems like forever. She had started one of the first support groups for the suicide bereaved in the late 1970s after the death of her son Kent. She then spent the rest of her life trying to ease the journey for all of us who would come after her.
Today is what would have been LaRita’s 92 birthday. I always call her on her birthday and yesterday I checked to make sure I had the date right (Facebook has made me lazy in that way– I don’t write it down and instead check a person’s profile). It was there that I found out LaRita had died on May 13, six months ago.
It’s hard to sit on the outside, to be one of those people we call family, because oftentimes we don’t know what has happened to someone as the family might not contact us. I have quite a few people in my life who would tell you I am family, but sometimes when they’ve died, unless I see an obituary or the family posts somewhere on social media, I don’t know. Or I might find out when something like an invitation is returned in the family (that happened two years ago with my friend Sally– we had been out of town when she died so I didn’t see the obituary).
We had a great weekend- Greg’s team won the girls soccer state championship, my Chelle Summer Holiday event was the best one I’ve had yet, but this excitement is tempered today by the news of LaRita’s death. I’m not just grieving the loss of my friend, but also of not knowing when it happened.
I know that LaRita was tired, that her body was failing her– she told me so when we talked on her birthday last year. Her husband Eldon had died a few years before. She had to carry around an oxygen tank to breathe. She didn’t have the energy to do things she once did. She had lost two children, one to suicide, one to an unexpected illness.
But she was such a part of thirty years of my life, more than half my life. And not just the suicide grief that brought us together. As the years went by, we shared more and more. We still talked about suicide grief and related topics, but we also simply enjoyed each other’s company.
She so badly wanted to come to my wedding when married Greg but no one would make the trip to Albuquerque with her and she was past the point in her life she felt safe enough to drive the trip down I25 from Colorado Springs to Albuquerque. We had always visited each other and I know she wanted me to visit more, that she was a bit envious we went to LA to see the Blooms instead of going north to see her (I tried to explain it was because they had the ocean).
I have so much more to say, but I think that’s where I’ll stop today. She had an enormous influence on much of my adult life, being that I was 21 when we met. Perhaps more blogs will come from it, particularly one about a major influence she still has to this day. Sometimes I need to travel the road a little to sort it out. Or swim some laps.
I’ll do that now. I know she is at peace, she is with Eldon, her parents, and her children Kent and Karen. But I will always miss the sound of her voice, of the funny things she would tell me. And the love she gave to me.
Chelle Summer Cover Up Tunics
If you haven’t met the Chelle Summer coverup tunics, now’s your chance in this week’s video.
Balancing Life Inside and Outside the Bubble
When the pandemic began in late winter 2020, my research job had just ended. We knew it was coming for a year and we had planned for it. But we also had planned for me to focus on Chelle Summer– which included selling at events in the Los Angeles area. The pandemic obviously changed our plans. While I had plenty of time to sew and create, what I didn’t have was the income that I hoped for.
Several years later, it’s been a roller coaster ride of not knowing what will happen on multiple fronts as everything keeps changing. I’m definitely not where I wanted to be and I’m finding myself having to continually reconfigure what I’m doing for Chelle Summer as things that worked before, don’t work now, and new opportunities arise, but not always ones that take off either.
In the midst of this, I’m also still navigating a new routine. Because of the pandemic, while I had Greg at home with me and then my neighborhood community that I see when I’m out running in the morning and then run-walking the dogs, there weren’t many other social opportunities or obligations. That allowed me to stay in my creative bubble longer and more often.
I believe that I am a balance of an extrovert and introvert. I need time with people, but I also need time alone. Now that we seem to be moving at double speed socially to make up for lost time, my challenge has been to figure out how to create (writing, sewing, painting) while also having enough time to be social and for life’s routine.
At first, I thought it was just me, that there was something wrong with me that I felt so overwhelmed because I wanted to create more, but have had to engage more socially. Then, as I took a little time to reflect back on the past few years, I realized it was because I never had a chance to adjust to life in the new routine without the job. Instead, the pandemic thrust a different routine into life.
While we’re all weathering some sort of continued change in our lives, it seems to me that the first step to lessening how overwhelming it can be is that awareness of what it stems from. As I have found that, I know the next step is taking things slowly, setting goals, and then reconfiguring them as they fit or don’t fit into my bubble and the life that revolves around it.
Spiritual Strength
We had been away from church for a month. We are Saturday evening mass goers, but there have been a variety of things happening on Saturdays between soccer and Chelle Summer. The hard part about being away from attending mass is that it’s so easy to get out of the routine that it then makes it hard to get back into it.
On Saturday afternoon, I wanted to keep working on the projects I was engaged in, but I knew we needed to go and it didn’t take me long to realize we were where were needed to be.
It wasn’t just about being the physical building– although as soon as I sat down in the pew I felt a sigh inside myself as in, “Thank goodness. I can rest.”
The usher quickly found us and asked us to bring up the gifts, something we regularly do, and I feel like is an extra blessing at mass. And then we received greetings from others.
However, there also has been some pain our church community over the past week or so- the unexpected death of a 31-year-old adult child and the death of an elderly father for another. Being there allowed us to express our condolences, let them know we are praying for them, and also to say an extra prayer for peace and love on the grief journey.
Yes, we were where we needed to be.
When church was closed for so long during the pandemic and then masks kept us from each other, it made it easier to stay separated, to send messages. But that’s not the way it’s supposed to be. We are meant to be there for each other. In person.
And I’m glad we were.
Peace in the Present
It’s so easy to get caught looking backward or forward, or a combination of both. Then when we wonder why we’re feeling bad– because we’re nostalgic for the past or wishing we were in the future where maybe things will be different. We don’t realize that our pain often comes from not rooting ourselves in the present.
I realize there are many people who believe the present is where their pain resides, however, we also have to remember that looking back we see things differently than they probably were and if we look forward, we’re looking toward things that haven’t happened yet and that can either be painful (our fear) or exhilarating (our hope for a better future). And so the vicious cycle begins– we look back, we look forward, and yet we don’t look around right where we’re at.
When I find myself anxious, maybe the worry that I missed a boat somewhere or the hope that I so badly want certain things to happen, I remind myself to stop and look around, to see where I’m at in that particular moment. That’s when I find a wave of peace and the anxiety retreats like an ocean wave.
It’s easy to look past what’s right there, the beauty of our surroundings or the people we’re with. Nothing is ever perfect, but we should always grasp the present moment. After all, soon it will be in the past, too.
Lots O' Orange
My laundry room, fun skirts, retro Tang, sweaters that hang just right, and lots of orange in this week's video.
The Choice to Move Forward
While there are a great many lessons that came from the suicide of my younger sister Denise, probably the most profound one was that I couldn’t stop living my life because she had died.
I was twenty-one when she died and when I would speak, I always said that before her death the world was my oyster. I knew I was bound for greater things than even I could see in front of me. But after she ended her life, I felt like the oyster shell had slammed shut on me. The key was I had to figure out how to push it back open, to see the open road and everything beyond that hill in front of me again.
In meeting people in the thirty years since Denise died, I have encountered countless people who have chosen not to move forward. These are people stuck in their grief, stuck in the pain, and many times refusing to budge from where they are. I wasn’t going to be one of them.
I have always known that I can’t change the past which means I also can’t bring my sister back. And when she died, I was twenty-one, I had a long life ahead of me. I wasn’t going to be destroyed by the loss. Life is short (Where have these thirty years gone? Heck, where has October gone?).
That’s not to say it was easy as it wasn’t and some days it still isn’t. As our world continues to evolve, and not necessarily in good ways it seems lately, I have to really reach inside myself and remember that I pried that oyster shell open once and I can do it again. Yet I also don’t want to have do to it again so instead I look up and ahead of me. I look at the view. I see the hope. I see the vista that stretches for miles.
And I remember that’s why I continue to forge forward.
Greeting the Day
It’s Monday morning as I write this and I can’t think of anything better than starting a new week with a sunrise like this one. I freely admit that I don’t jump out of bed in the morning, yet there is something about starting a new day before the sun comes up that makes it worth it to get up early.
Once I was doing a workshop outside Phoenix with a group of Navajos. It was a two-day workshop and on the second morning when I went for a run, I encountered one of the attendees on his way back (I was on my way out). He told me later that they have been taught to greet the day with their steps.
I always think of this- whether I’m out running in the early morning hours of the day or swimming as the sun is coming up. There is something to be said for starting a new day with steps or a swim, some kind of movement.
I was thinking this morning how easy it would have been to sleep in and miss this beautiful show by Mother Nature. It’s worth the effort to drag myself out of bed and into my running shoes. It’s the best way to greet a new day, to see hope in the possibilities ahead, no matter what happened the day before.
The Chelle Summer Videos Return
I made a little video yesterday- two new bags to share, some estate sales finds, a room filled with inventory ready to be transported to an event, and it wouldn't be a Chelle Summer video without some dog antics. Happy Friday, everyone!
Time vs. Process
We’ve all heard it– time heals all wounds.
If only it were true.
In all years my speaking with people after loss, particularly suicide loss, there have been those who had lost a loved one long before I had and their pain was much greater than mine. If it were true that time heals all wounds, they would have been leaps and bounds ahead of me. Instead, often they had been told to stuff their grief (mostly because it was suicide) into the back of the cabinet and move on.
Watching that pain was an integral reason why I worked so hard to process the loss of my sister, my parents, of my divorce, and the countless other losses that have happened in my life. When people ask how I was able to meet Greg and marry him and have such a good marriage, I tell them it’s because I did the work.
I trudged through the incoming surf and darkness like in the photo of the temple in Bali above. It wasn't pleasant ever and I hated every stupid minute of it, but I knew that if I wanted to go forward, it was what I had to do.
The processing road is rocky, but if you choose to stand still and simply look at it, things might get better for a time, but they’ll come back and eat away at you in a bigger, more painful way. It’s better to push yourself forward. You’ll find that sunshine, you’ll find the rainbow.
You’ll find the happiness. I know because I was there and I found it myself.
The Story Changes
I spoke at the high school where Greg teaches at two health classes a week ago. It had been some years since I’d spoken at a high school and I worried about how to tell the story of Denise's suicide, now thirty years in my rearview, to students who are fourteen/fifteen, two lifetimes for them removed from it happening.
But as I began to speak and weave parts of her story leading up to her death as well as the immediate aftermath for us, something struck me– how much the story has changed in those thirty years.
I first spoke at schools about three years after she had died, maybe less than that. Comparing it to having thirty years of happenings to share, I wondered how I filled the time previously. But I spoke in more detail about the events leading up to her death and the immediate aftermath. Those are the very things that I now weave into the story, more sidebars to other parts of what I share.
When I was living back in Naperville after my divorce and not long before I moved back to Albuquerque, my high school health teacher, Mazz, asked me to speak at his advanced health classes (there were two). Even then (now more than ten years ago), I worried what I could say that might inspire them.
After I finished speaking, a girl came up to me and told me how much she appreciated my story because they were all seniors getting ready to graduate and hearing all that I had been through made them see, “That no matter what we go through, we’ll be okay.”
I had been so focused on working through my challenges that I didn’t see how they could help others. Now it’s time to share how I made it happen.
Sustaining Hope: National Suicide Prevention Week
Sunday was World Suicide Prevention Day and I thought I wrote a really good post on reminding people to seek help and where they could do that (one can call or text 988). The post didn’t go anywhere on Facebook, did a little better on Instagram, did the best on Stimulus. I bring this up because in the United State each day, we lose 132 people, that means a plane full of people dying each day. And yet I find it interesting that Meta, which owns both Facebook and Instagram, clearly kept my post from going anywhere.
Suicide affects us all and the numbers continue to push upwards. There are a lot of reasons to not be happy when one rolls out of bed each morning. Despite all this, I’m here to remind you that there a lot of good things in our lives, but it’s up to use to find them! No one else is going to do it for us. No matter what’s going on around us, we still need to get up, we still need to go through the motions. But in that, we need to add something– seeking what sustains the hope inside us.
I know where I find hope. I have worked hard to cultivate that in my life and I have tried to help others with these blogs and the things that I post on social media. As I write this, I’m getting ready to head up to the high school where Greg teaches and speak to two health classes. Part of my message will be about this very thing I’m writing here– sustaining hope. We can all find hope, but how do we sustain it?
In this National Suicide Prevention Week, my challenge to you is to think about what sustains your hope. Make a list! I hope it’s a long one! Keep it somewhere so that you can refer to it when you feel down (or down on the world at large). Remember that quote and saying, “Happiness is an inside job”? That’s the truth.
Seek it, find it, hold onto it.
Hope in Emptiness
It’s funny, for several weeks this phrase– there is hope in emptiness– has been running through my mind. And yet I can’t remember where I saw it. I actually think it might have been something I wrote in the manuscript I’m working on and stumbled on, but I don’t want to give myself that much credit.
How easy it is to forget that no matter what’s happening to us, no matter what road we’re traveling, there is hope..
Somewhere along this journey, we seem to have been taught that we will get instant answers if we pray for something. I learned that one the hard way- the answers don’t always come right away (have they ever?) and sometimes the answers aren’t quite what we expect them to be (remember, always be specific for what you’re asking for!).
The reality is that prayer often feels dry and empty. But, yes, there’s hope in that because there is hope in taking the time to ask, to know that there is possibility in that asking.
Someone once told me the sun can’t stay down forever and I always remember that when life feels overwhelming and challenging. It’s like the sun has to break through those clouds eventually.
It’s much the same for hope– it’s out there even though we can’t always see it or feel it. Life isn’t joyful and fulfilling all the time. We must be open that even when we do feel empty, that life feels meaningless, we don’t know what beauty and joy is around the corner.
There is hope in emptiness. I bet each time you repeat that when you feel emptiness, the dark clouds will subside and you’ll see some glimmer of blue that reminds you that it’s there and you’ll find it soon.
The Surfing Anniversary
When I wrote about surfing and Bali last week– or the lack of surfing I did in Bali- wasn’t aware that twelve years ago today I surfed for the first time (in Rye, New Hampshire). And eleven years ago last week, I picked up my custom-made surfboard in Redondo Beach, CA.
These anniversaries, paired with my move to Albuquerque for graduate school in August 1994, sit in the back of my mind, but always come to the front when the calendar turns to August each year.
While I understand the significance of starting a new numerical year on January 1, for me, the most movement forward has always taken place as summer turns to fall. Some of it is obviously school related, but there is something about the fall that brings on new things in my life. Perhaps it’s because the start of school always meant new things– new clothes, new friends, new classes– and that has become a routine of sorts and carried through to the rest of my life.
But taking that surfing lesson in Rye on that August Saturday and getting my board a year later were part of sweeping changes of moving my life forward. The photo above also was taken in Rye although I believe in 2012. When I see those two girls (the daughters of a high school friend’s sister), they were to represent Denise and I and the significance of water in our sister relationship.
I have always written about the importance of the ocean and the Holiday Inn (usually!) swimming pool and how much time we spent in those places together. Surfing not only challenged me to do something new in my life as I was getting divorced and turned forty, it also gave me a different relationship with the water, specifically the ocean.
I wrote last week that I long be on the back side of the waves, listening to the water lap under my balsa wood board. I never would have had that without surfing. It has helped me form different relationships with places I have visited from Hawaii to Australia to Wale.
And it changed my relationship with God as a priest I knew started to call it “surfing with Jesus.”
I had no idea how much my life would change twelve years ago today when I took that chance on something I never ever thought I’d get to do my life. But I see now it helped me become closer not just to the person I want to be, but the person I’m supposed to be. I don’t get to surf at least for now, but I still get to keep forging forward and surfing has helped me do that.
