"I am who I am because the person I loved most in one moment in time was alive and then he died."
Category: Family
Meet Mathias
In this excerpt, Mathias and the family have returned to Minnesota after two years in Norway. Mathias still plans to leave (abandon) his family, but he hasn’t worked out the details yet.
Meet Erling
Erling was always nice to me the few times I saw him, but I didn’t grow up with him, so I can’t fault my family for their feelings. It’s why I changed the Erling character in my novel so drastically from the one my family disregarded in real life.
Meet Alexandra (plus, an excerpt)
Today, meet Alexandra Amalie Johanson Anderson Peterson, my great-grandmother and the protagonist of my novel.
And now for something not so different… Fiction v nonfiction
To paraphrase the Beatles, there’s nothing we can know that isn’t already known.
Grief is a wild child…
“Grief is a wild child. You’ll never tame it, but it’s ok to let it flow through you. Better through than around. Be good to yourself, and don’t take shortcuts.”
Fifty First Everythings All the Time
I still expected him to “snap out of it,” come to his senses, want to improve, remember who he used to be. Remember who he used to be to me.
When Grief takes a Twist
"Do we ever truly let go of the people with whom we’ve been intimate on some level? Doesn’t a part of them live on inside us forever?"
“Will you sign this?” — 8-year-old me
"I only hope that in knowing me, I enhanced their lives, too."
Show Up for Goodbye
But hospice is its own kind of limbo, isn’t it? It’s crowded with feelings, but offers no crystal ball to tell us how we’ll feel when that life is actually over.
Lynn Haraldson, Author and Writing Mentor 