By Maria Psalm 130: 1-6 Psalm 40:1-3 1 John 4: 7-19 When I was 16, my mother, sister, and two close family friends, Judy and Elizabeth, went on an epic road trip from Maryland to the Southwest. We made a stop to visit the Grand Canyon, but our main destination was Glorieta, New Mexico, to […]
Category: Maria’s thoughts
The daughter’s reflections on this project, born in grief, to honor her mother’s memory
Grief and the pandemic
Maria May 2020 The fact is that I thought about starting this blog a few weeks before she died. I was even tempted to call it “Dying Would Be the Easy Part”. She and I would write together about the really hard conversations we were having, about how to arrange care for her as she […]
I Am the Revenge of My Grandmothers
Maria, January 2020 I think that my very life is the revenge of my foremothers, all of them. I’ve thought many times about my grandmothers. One was Anastasia, who I never met. She died 5 years before I was born. But I know that she was born at the turn of the last century to […]
Letter from my first week at college
Maria, September 1992 Dear Mom, I have been here a week already. I can hardly believe it, but at the same time, I feel I’ve been here forever. I was trained for this. You raised me and supported me to believe in myself and dream. You raised me to be a happy child and a […]
Out of the fog of grief, an introduction
Maria, November 2019 I am Maria, freshly grieving older daughter of Denise, who passed away in November, 2019. Denise was a native New Yorker and while she raised her two daughters in Maryland, she spoke of Coney Island, the subway, the Macy’s parade, and black and white cookies with such nostalgia that I couldn’t help […]