elisem | Entries tagged with grief

There's someone who is trying to raise funds for memorial services and to bury his brother who died of exposure last weekend. I'll just say what I said on bluesky:

His family wants to do memorial services in Minneapolis and in Wisconsin where he was born and will be buried.

If you've felt grief, if you've comforted people in grief, please help these folks.

(My own mother died this morning.

If you were gonna bring me a hot dish,

please give here instead.)

https://www.gofundme.com/f/honoring-harold-lightfeather-benny-boy

Thank you.
And thank you also for sharing the info elsewhere as well if you can.

Here's where I am today, I guess.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InyT9Gyoz_o

After some trouble getting ahold of me, my sister has let me know that our mother died this morning.

(So maybe don't assume I remember anything I'm supposed to remember this week?)
My sister and her husband continue to be awesome in these matters. As does Juan.

OK. Gonna go have food and meds now.

My sister and I have been talking about childhood learning and adult learning or re-learning, about agency and autonomy, about critical thinking and biases and knowledge and respect and all of that. It's been on both of our minds particularly because we're coming up on the first anniversary of our father's death. There's a book I'm reading about raising critical thinkers. I can't wait to talk about it with my sister.

If you've lost a parent, is there something you were reading about a year later that was particularly meaningful, particularly helpful, to you?

Any advice you might have for someone getting through the year anniversary of the death of a (complicated? estranged? charismatic? difficult?) parent is welcome here in this particular comments section.

And now I'll go back to thinking about what my sister's been saying about things she wishes we could have learned earlier, and ways that learning gets accomplished, as I read this book on raising critical thinkers. (Review upcoming. Probably without too many digressions about Catherine Winkworth, but we'll see.)

The problem with grief is that when it knocks, you're always home.

If you are going through grief too, I send you love and an autumn Minneapolis sunbeam.

Mike wrote "The Declaration" for us in 1998, and a couple of years earlier I wrote a poem for him. Every now and then lines from both of them float through my consciousness. Sometimes, though, I need to go back and let the words pass before my eyes one by one, in their cadences, taking the time it takes to reread something that he undoubtedly knew I would go back to, and something else where I was trying to tell him about time and eternity-in-mortal-time and all sorts of things that I could only say with those lines.

Tonight it was this:

One partner: I stand here with you because together we possess infinity in a finite space of time, and our combined reach surpasses the mortal.

Other partner: I stand here with you because we have seen in each other a shared task: and though the void may separate us, and matter must always fail, we shall never truly be apart, one from the other.

Together we take joint and equal command of the time still before us, to watch and to defend, to endure the cold and the fire, to stand until the last.
For against that power armies are as nothing, and Death itself comes begging and ashamed.

So please be aware that all the CN are in the tags, and here, have a link: https://elisem.dreamwidth.org/1306788.html

(So for those of you who don't know, my father died one week ago today. We had a complicated relationship full of difficult situations, but I sang one of his favorite songs to him a week ago Sunday night, and he passed the next morning, Monday the 16th. Anyhow. I have been talking with a couple of folks about funeral and grief customs, and how I am in much more of a slough of grief than I expected, and how it's hard to be vulnerable but I could maybe let people be kind, and let them know they can help, and that it does help. So I said I would make this post.)

Hi, I am vulnerable and I am not comfortable being vulnerable or letting people help sometimes, but here I am trying my best.

If people would like to send me good wishes, condolences, kind words, that can be done here. (Thank you!)

If you want a snail address to mail something to, I can give you that, or probably

jenett can.

If you want to bring me a hotdish I love you. (If you want to send a virtual hotdish, one friend agreed that this is why Zingerman's and Goldbelly make gift cards; if you want to send a closer-to-home virtual hotdish, Lunds & Byerly's also makes gift cards.)

If you want to send me completely unrelated and wonderfully distracting book recommendations, those are gladly and gratefully accepted.

If you want to do something just good in general, if you know anyone whose relationship with their parents is or was rather fraught, check in on them and send a good word their way.

I'm kind of a mess right now, and I expect I will be kind of a mess until the funeral on January 30 and probably afterwards for a while. My sister continues to be a hero, as do her husband Curtis and Penny the Wonder Corgi. My deepest thanks to everybody who has already checked in, waved hello, sent love, and/or sent good distracting/comforting links.

In the course of reshelving various treasures, I came across a bit of printed-out electronic correspondence from my dear Mr. Ford. One line was, "I love you. In any language or subset thereof."

He said that he loved me, and he said it often.

He was such a Mike.

I was so lucky. And I still am.

Thanks for listening.

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Elise Matthesen

Entries tagged with grief

Other people trying to do the right thing in grief need some help - please read. Thank you

you may know this one already (On the Nature of Daylight)

in the midst: another passage

in the midst: nearly a year has gone by

when it knocks

Sometimes I Reread Things To Visit With Him

Letting People Help During Grief

sorting through messages from Mike

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February 2026

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