Remembering You: Est. October 2024

It didn’t happen overnight.

And to be honest, it didn’t happen over the course of a day, or even a week… it’s been silently brewing inside me for years; and I couldn’t understand it fully - until recently. And, once I recognized this peculiarity about myself, I knew I had to explore it further.

So I did.

During this inquisitive portion of my life journey, I asked and learned more about myself, about my outlook and about what makes my breath get caught in my throat. I finally understood that I wasn’t just “sensitive” or “dramatic” (even though, yes - I am, in fact, both!), I am a bittersweet. Now, let me explain a little more before you start rolling your eyes. When I say I’m a bittersweet person, what I’m trying to convey is that I believe bitter and sweet or dark and light … good and bad, can and typically do co-exsist. But, what does this have to do with this “ah-ha” moment I was telling you about? Well, let me give a little more context, I feel like a little backstory is needed.

My dad was diagnosed with a rare form of dementia when he was 50 years old and I was only twenty-two. Over the course of his disease and the next nine years, I watched him loose himself, his personality, his ability to talk and eventually to walk and to independently care for himself. I watched him disappear, piece by piece and I mourned each portion of him that steadily left.

And that slow, heart-wrenching experience was the start of my intimate relationship with grief and loss.

Now, of course, I’m giving you the “elevator pitch” of the backstory for the sake of my fingers and your waning interest, but I do need to convey that through this brutally difficult long goodbye, I got to know myself on a whole other level. I really began to understand myself and the inherent fact about myself that I find grief and loss to be one of the most beautiful, triumphant and meaningful phenomenons that a human being experiences.

I believe that sorrow and longing are to be marveled at, not stuffed down or ignored. I very much believe that it is the same sorrow and longing that truly and beautifully enrich our lives. I should add here that I am a “normal” person, I don’t have dark paint around my eyes or gothic statues in my room… I just believe in the sacredness of a poignant moment and find the depths of this human experience (both the bitter and the sweetness of it all) extraordinary.

Part of that realization helped fuel this space, but the other contributing factor was I believe, perhaps, that I always loved the tender moments in sadness or the beauty in longing. I believe what we lose teaches us what makes ourselves more whole. I believe that although grief is debilitating and life changing, it often times allows for more growth and more self awareness.

So through the ah-ha moment, through losing my dad and finding myself, I knew I needed to find or create a space to house this juxtaposition; this bearing witness to both dark and light, love and loss…

And here we are…

xo,

R