Archive for August, 2025

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Opening Pandora’s Box

August 20, 2025

Preparing to Dive In

There are times of relative ease in my work with my therapist. Almost placid. Moments of rest and regrouping. The months after Mom’s death were not this. And I will simply say that I am grateful for the support of my husband and son, friends, and the wisdom of my therapist. This is not a journey to undertake alone.

The sessions were frequent and intense, with Yoga breathing, cognitive behavioral therapy, and EMDR, a process I’ll talk more about later. Suffice it to say, it is a method to help release and finish processing trauma that was put away raw, alive, and unhealed. An understatement.

And there was painting. Lots of painting. The only journaling I could do was to jot down the things we covered in the sessions, any insights from them, and all the questions that needed answers. Essentially, that unsealed pit of long-hidden emotions was in the driver’s seat, revealing to us what the next work was.

And on this day, the mental wrestling of “Should I? Shouldn’t I?” came to a stop. We dove in, and it unloaded….

Painting by author
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Weapons of the Ghosts — Secrets, Shame, Stigma – The Triad of Toxicity

August 19, 2025

Painting by author

The place of ghosts

We all have a shadow side…a place of dark rage, born out of the pain of abandonment that wails the cry: “What about me?”

It is a place of our ghosts, filled with toxic poisons, bubbling, oozing, and swelling in a stoppered bottle. As the fires of life’s pain intensify, the heat and pressure build. The boiling liquid rises, forcing itself hard against the stopper until, finally, the block gives way.

If we’re lucky, it will just push the stopper up enough to leak out and ease the pressure. Or, if we can bring attention and wisdom to the process in time, we might be able to toggle the stopper slowly and safely release what’s under it. But if we ignore it, it builds, explodes, splatters, and destroys.

Transformative wrath

I love mythology and stories about old wise women and crones…especially since I am one now, at least, old. So, this excerpt by Jean Shinoda Bolen, MD, in her book, Goddesses in Older Women, says it eloquently:

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What if You Can No Longer Outrun What Chases You?

August 18, 2025

Painting by author

You can run, but someday you will have to slow down. And what if what chases you doesn’t?

I was never one to run away from a fight. Once I got out of that house, I never backed down or yielded to a challenge. They were “gauntlets thrown down,” and it was my ethic to always pick up the gauntlet and fight back. At least with concrete things like confronting my father. Protecting my son. Learning the “next thing” I needed to, so I could live a healthy, useful life.

At that point, it was the right thing to operate from a place of “keep going and tough it out, because others need you.” It was the truth. You don’t stop to examine “within” when you are fighting external battles.

And society encourages that too, with its spoken or unspoken, but expected rule: Move on. Get over it. Leave it behind. It’s better now, so why dwell on the past? Sometimes society can be downright cruel and tell you that to revisit the past wounds is just indulgence or navel-gazing. But regardless, for those times, I did what I needed to when it mattered. And I am satisfied with that.

But after Mom died, and the emotional roller-coaster that followed, I realized there finally comes a day when there are no more “priorities” in line ahead of you, and life is asking, “Are you ready to face yourself?”

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What Haunts Me?

August 17, 2025

Painting by author

While I couldn’t articulate the issues yet or name all the ghosts, I could feel them. They surrounded me, pressed up against me, shoved me down from above, and choked in my throat. They seemed to take up all the oxygen and all the space, until I finally felt like I couldn’t move.

If I tried to pull away or in, they just took up more space, leaving little for me. Who were the ghosts? Who was I anymore?

So I painted what they felt like. At least I could “see” how bad I felt. Their presence was like an emotional version of that stomach bug.

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The Gordian Knot Tightens

August 16, 2025

Painting by author

Eventually, those fog banks in my psyche concentrated themselves into a dense wall of black, looming ominously on the horizon. And all those aching, unidentified emotions were tightened into such a Gordian knot that only bold action stood a chance to untangle it. But…which thread to pull first?

And as a side note — I was also trying to hold all this at bay while I continued to work and manage the tasks of life. But there was no longer any stuffing them back behind any dam. They were out and letting me know there was more coming. So in my private moments, I painted, and tried to make sense of what was happening. And I learned that the longer you wait to begin, the tighter the knot binds itself together.

So, my choice was simple.

Do I spend the rest of my life avoiding “whatever it was,” forcing a smile, using “mind over matter” to pretend all was fine, and ignoring any evidence to the contrary?

Or…do I finally face it?

And exactly what was “it”?

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The Fog of No Words

August 15, 2025

The Fog

After all the see-sawing of emotions I had been totally unaware of, the final surprise was what came next — the silence. In that immensity and intensity of whatever this was about, it silenced me, and I had no words.

So I painted. And painted. And painted. And gradually, a few words seeped out.

Painting by author
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The Unexpected Side of Caregiving and Grief: The Breaking Dam

August 13, 2025

Painting by author

So what happened after Mom’s death?

I guess I expected that, like after Dad’s death, I would feel relief…or maybe more correctly, peace and serenity, given how it all ended.

While his aftermath was the relief of a threat finally extinguished, hers was the completion of caregiving done honorably. Though we parted with many unresolved things, I felt such peace at her transformation at the end…a kind of redemption from the rest of her life.

So I expected something more like: “It is done.” With both parents gone, and it being the end of that whole era, I should be able to “get over it,” “move on,” and “leave the past behind.” All those things people say, as if just the fact it is finally done means it is “over.” But nothing was further from the truth.

Instead, there was an intense explosion of a whole mess of emotions, ranging from love and grief, compassion and confusion, to anger, disappointment, abandonment, and back again to grief.

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Mom’s Death – The End of an Era – and A Beginning

August 7, 2025
Author photo of Mom’s High School Graduation picture

Death – the alternate reality

“Lorazepam.”

That word rattled my brain and took me right back to my Mom’s death in 2021.

I tried to snap back into the present moment, as I was in the middle of a visit with a dying friend. She apologized for her mental fog.

“I hate the meds…they make me so fuzzy…but it helps. Something with an L…”

A family member sitting nearby said, “Lorazepam,” and explained it helped calm my friend’s agitation.

I remembered the drug, and knew the emotional place they were in — the concern about: “Should you give it?” …”How much?”…”How often?”…”Is it too soon?”… “Am I causing harm?” 

There’s no question that modern hospice practices are a blessing for the dying and their family. But the dying process itself has its own struggles. After a lifetime of always focusing on healing someone, now you have to wrap your head around helping them die. We spend our lives encouraging our sick family members to eat, take vitamins, and see the doctor. Then at the end, you have to do a rapid reversal and stop giving food, ease off liquids, and stifle every impulse to offer a medical intervention. It’s the right thing to do, but it goes against every instinct we’ve been trained to follow, and it’s even harder if you’ve spent your life as a medical professional trying to heal people.

As I walked back to my car, the word Lorazepam pounded in my brain. Yes. That was the first hospice medication I had to administer to my Mother as she was dying.

It all came back as if it were yesterday. Mom’s discomfort. The meds. Her prayer in her semi-conscious state:

“Help me, Mother Angelica…”

***

Can you hold the pain from a lifetime of emotional distance and hurt, along with your empathy and love for that person, and care for them as they die?

The shit-show

Maybe it was in keeping with the hand that life dealt my Mother that her death process was doomed to be difficult. In terms of getting much assistance from her local hospice, it was a shit-show from the start, even though it wasn’t their fault.

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Dad – The Last Conversation

August 4, 2025

Photo by author

It was Wednesday night, March 7, 2013, about 7 pm. We were heading home in the morning. I had completed my part in “Dad’s death process,” honorably. But at the moment, he was being a real bastard to the young hospice nurse, and we needed to calm him down. So we headed back to the hospice facility.

How long’s this gonna take?

He had early dementia and was dying of stomach cancer. His care had become too much for Mom to keep him at home anymore, and his end was getting close. So, my husband and I had traveled to their home in Pennsylvania to help my Mother move him into a local hospice there.

The Maria Hall Hospice facility was a peaceful place, located on the grounds of the Motherhouse for the Catholic order of nuns there — the Sisters of Saints Cyril and Methodius, in Danville, PA. My Mother’s sister had belonged to that order before she died years earlier in a tragic car accident. For the last several years, my parents had been living nearby in a retirement community run by that same order of nuns.

In his typical fashion, he was being difficult to the end. When we moved him in on Monday, he glared at me from his chair and said,

“Well, what do I do now?”

I suggested rest.

On Tuesday, as he lay there, he looked up at me and asked,

“So, how long’s this gonna take?”

As kindly as I could, I simply said, “Well, Dad, I don’t know. That’s between you and God.”

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The Thousand-Yard Stare – Starting at the End of an Era

August 1, 2025
Self-portrait by the author, shortly before the illnesses and deaths of her parents

For most of my adult life, I was the warrior. Strong against him because I needed to be. I tried to get him to go for help. He wouldn’t. I was forced to draw a line in the sand to protect our kids.

But emotions are never so clear-cut, and life was always a pendulum between walking away and maintaining some kind of extended family relationship for our son’s sake, and… let’s be honest, mine, too. Because unless someone has no redeeming qualities — in which case it’s easy to walk away and never look back — if that person has also “done good things at times,” and used the powers of intermittent love and trauma bonding on you since infancy, it’s a lot more complicated.

I tried for “middle path” – allowing love, but standing guard. I was determined to be strong, and never again be that “trapped, weak, passive victim from the past,” nor let any one else be put in that same position. And yes, at that point I judged my younger self harshly and with no love.

But it all grew exhausting. As I got older and life had battered me over the decades, my husband noted that my self-portrait above bore a resemblance to a battle-weary soldier’s thousand-yard stare. I kept pushing me, but at the same time, a question I kept shoving to the back of my brain haunted me:”What happens when I am no longer strong?”

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