Dear Sister

October 3, 2025 / Hermionejh

I listened to a message you had left that sunny September day in 2023, letting me know you were in the hospital – ‘doing okay,’ although you said you were feeling very weak.

It’s hard to listen to now because you’re gone. It was just three months from your diagnosis to your death. As we talked during those months, you said that it had been a couple of years that things were starting to not feel right. You said you were tired all the time, and you couldn’t get to your doctor, and when you finally did, he minimized what was happening. Unfortunately, you weren’t someone who would demand being adequately treated.

By the time they had ordered tests when you had called me from the hospital, it was already basically too late (although no one could know that in the moment).

But I think you did know. I think that’s why you had me take you home that night. I’m sure you were terrified, and you were trying to run from it. I understand it now in a way that I didn’t before.

I’m so sorry that we never got back to the kind of friendship we had in our twenties. I don’t really know what happened, but maybe it was just time moving on and life shaping us.

I hope you know that I always loved you, and always wished that we could be friends again. I know that you loved me, but I didn’t feel like you liked me very much, and I felt hurt and defensive.

If there’s another place where I’ll see you again, I hope that we’re in our best selves with each other. But I’ll be glad to see you no matter what.

I’m also glad I saved your message – I’ll take the bitter to have the sweet.

We Rise

July 31, 2025 / Hermionejh

We say: We do not condone this. We will not cooperate. We will not willingly give our rights – rights fought, bled, and died for by several generations before us who faced a monstrous moment or moments.

The work was not just about them. It was for the future. It was for their communities, their children, and your children, and all of our children’s children – those who will also be asked to meet whatever moment will be presented to them. Their choice is theirs, but our choice is to resist, to rise.

Those descendants need to know that facing cruelty was, and still is, possible. We all give up our lives in the end, and while we hope it will not come to that, we have to be prepared for that outcome. Physical death only comes once, but oppression is a daily death to our hope and to our spirit – and leaves no road map for those who will come after.

Store, sell, or give away belongings. Write a will, instructions to deal with your belongings, and notes to those you love, and to those not yet born who you would want to know and would love.

Courage is willingness to step into the unknown, even when we’re full of fear. Death comes to us all. Maybe we will survive facing the oppressors, and best them, but we defy their demands for us to capitulate – knowing it might be our last act.

This is our moment and our test as a nation, as a people. Our values are being revealed, and so many beautiful souls are standing up in whatever ways they can.

Be brave, be kind, be persistent, and be loud! Huzzah!

Here And Now

October 24, 2024October 24, 2024 / Hermionejh / 1 Comment

The yard is frosted over this morning, late autumn is tip-toeing over the land. The maple in the side yard is nearly naked – its yellow leaves left a skirt around its base.

Everything is quiet as I breathe in the chilled air. Nothing disturbs the break of day.

It’s good to be here now and to be alive to witness this.

I know many are suffering all through our Country and all through the world. There is no taking a moment to breathe in the quiet morning air. There is work to do.

Mud needs to be dug out – in some places it’s three or four feet deep. They need helping hands, a kind word, food, and rest.

I’m sorry that there are people who believe that officials are holding back funds or national guard workers when those officials are there to assess what’s needed. I wish we weren’t easy prey for mis- and dis-information.

There are good people everywhere but there are also those who delight in causing harm.

Maybe we’ll lose this experiment we’ve been privileged to have the last few hundred years, and maybe a dictatorship with the censorship and grueling conditions of such rulers will cause regret in those who welcomed it and helped usher it in, but it will be too late then. There will be no more speaking out.

History and living examples of authoritarianism are begging us to see what happens under those conditions, but sometimes something set in motion has to play out.

Much like the season turning, leaves falling, and frost deadening the bright summer growth, spring will come again. I just hope it’s not before years of winter.

I Forgot

February 13, 2024February 13, 2024 / Hermionejh

Our brain and body’s super power is perseverance.

We forget childbirth’s intensity, and blunt trauma’s pain. We can remember that it was awful, but not really feel the raw intensity.

Our brains anesthetize us against horrific events. We go numb.

My partner was in a horrible accident that rattled his brain so bad the doctors had to drill his skull to relieve the pressure, and he fell into a coma for several weeks.

The doctors told his parents they were likely saying goodbye to him and to try to prepare for that.

He doesn’t remember a thing about the accident. He remembers leaving for a party with his friends, and waking up briefly in enormous pain at the hospital, only to sink down into oblivion again. The next time he regained awareness, he was being wheeled into rehab where he spent painful months while learning to use his voice after being intubated so long, and to use his body again.

He can only recount what the driver (his cousin), and the medics and hospital staff, his parents, brother, and his girlfriend told him about what happened.

They can barely talk about it to this day without choking up.

Had he died, he would have been in blissful ignorance.

This is my dark time of year. I forgot.

How, you might ask. How, when it happens every year? I can only look at you in silence. I wish I knew.

I think, perhaps, my brain anesthetizes that particular knowledge, which is difficult because I am woefully unprepared every year. It would be funny if it weren’t so devastating.

But this year there are extenuating circumstances. The death of friends over the past year, and most recently a sister, pushed my preparation for this dark time completely out of my mind.

I use my lighter times of year to shore up my psyche, my resolve, and practice my emotional and mental tools I have learned over the past thirty years.

And then it seems to all fall apart in my moment of need – as though I’m fresh on the planet and have no idea what this thing called emotion is or how to handle it.

Maybe I can come up with a safe word or phrase my partner can say to me, like “It’s the fucking trauma, stupid!”

Yeah, that would go over so well! LOL

Maybe “Keep it simple, sweetheart,” would suffice.

She Was Here

January 11, 2024January 11, 2024 / Hermionejh / 2 Comments

I pick up a paper from the growing stack of papers, and sympathy cards scattered here and there on the table, and I put it back down. I seem to walk in circles – doing mindless tasks, and chores – but nothing that requires real focus because I can’t seem to get myself together lately.

I’m supposed to be writing her obituary, but I can’t. It nauseates me to think of it – like maybe I’m making it real? I don’t think that’s really it. Maybe it’s that I have to face all that her passing means.

Any chance of a closer relationship is gone. While we both lived there was the possibility.

What is an obituary anyway? So much is left out. It’s the highlights, the best of them.

We don’t talk about the trauma much, if at all – or the pain and lingering hurt. That’s for me to work out alone, but it makes the writing seem disingenuous.

She was this, and that. She did these things, and then she left.

She left in the middle-ish of her life, and didn’t want to go – but not many of us do, regardless of our age.

She had a small life that she enjoyed, and she worked hard.

She didn’t know that she was getting sick, or that once she got sick it would be two & a half months of progressive hell with the hope that she’d regain function that never happened.

Her partner is devastated – shell-shocked really – and just a shadow in his own life now. Work is what saves him from the gaping hole of grief.

Her chair sits empty – her belongings mostly gone. How quickly physical traces got erased.

Do I want a shrine to her? Don’t we all deserve a shrine? We lived, dammit! WE WERE HERE.

I see my favorite picture of her in my mind’s eye. She is standing on a hill, maybe, with an Aruban breeze whipping her long copper red hair into her brightly laughing face. The beaming sun brings the feeling of warmth and being fully alive into that moment she was captured mid-laughter.

That was one of the happiest periods in her life. That’s when we were friends & I got to enjoy her company – her sense of adventure and be part of her strong, independent and earthy existence. She was fearless and exuberant. Her life was filled with activity: camping, canoeing, sunbathing, swimming, singing, dancing, and laughing.

But life moves on. She was better at letting go than I was. She went to nursing school, and finally got her bachelor’s degree focusing on diabetes education where she began a career.

She liked her house and her garden – so many things she did on her own.

She was good to my son, her nephew.

Time took away her sense of fun – or maybe that was what she thought maturity was.

Maybe we all figure out what’s comfortable for us, or what we’re willing to accept. Or maybe time just goes by regardless of what we’d like.

She was important to me. She was family. She showed up and made a point to have at least four gatherings a year.

I wished she had been kinder to me as time went on, but I didn’t recognize that maybe she was changing in ways that she didn’t understand herself.

Accepting how she changed was hard for me. I’ve changed too. Time changes us all whether we know it or not.

We have an essential self that gets buried under life’s burdens, but we can still shine through.

I will remember that laughing young woman, grateful for all she gave me as her sister, and hoping that she remembered the goodness we once shared.

I love you Twyla. I hope you’re in your happiest self, sparkling among the stars.

Super Memory Not So Super

September 26, 2023September 26, 2023 / Hermionejh

It was within the last few years that I realized that my memory is sometimes radically different than family members and friends. I don’t have exact daily life recall – and certainly don’t remember all events – but I have vivid recall of full or partial conversations and situations from my childhood, and continuing to the present day.

I recently asked a friend if she remembered something from when we spent a lot of time together in our 20’s, and she didn’t, but it was significant to us both at the time.

I didn’t know that my recall of family and friends past activities, events, and conversations was extraordinary – and was often puzzled that they remembered something vague or nothing. My next-oldest sister didn’t even remember that we had gone to see the band, The Police, together until I texted her a picture of the keepsake ticket stub.

Even my son says he barely remembers his childhood – which is either a good thing or a troubling thing – but if I bring up a specific event, he might have some more recollection, but it’s still way more vague than mine.

I heard a scientist on Alan Alda’s podcast, Clear and Vivid With Alan Alda, who remarked that some people are super rememberers, but then he went on to describe how difficult that must be, and it made me break down sobbing.

It hit me so hard because I didn’t have a name or place for that particular grief for the last few decades since I started feeling so alienated, especially from my sisters. I didn’t know that they don’t have the same vivid memories of closeness and togetherness that I do. I thought they just didn’t like me much anymore.

It’s almost like I walk into a room in the past and I see the setting, the people, and re-live certain conversations, and experience the feelings that I had then – hear the jokes and laughter, or the cutting remarks, and sharpness – and they don’t. At all.

I didn’t know that was a not-so-super power of mine that set me up with expectations that we are all still the same as we always were. I mean, I know we’ve changed and grown (or regressed), but I am still the essential self I was born with.

I have to forget my memories if I want to have current relationships with my sisters, but it’s like having to cut out a part of myself – a real, present self that also lives the past. It’s painful.

Getting “over myself,” as I had been admonished to do throughout my early years, was a big fail. I just learned to shut down, but not get “tougher”.

Being sensitive is a blessing and a curse. Not only am I highly sensitive to moods, but I almost always know when there’s a ‘presence’ – whether a spirit or left-over energy somewhere – and I seem to have the ability to direct healing energy, but I have zero idea how that works. I just know I feel it, and people tell me they receive it.

The irony is that I can’t seem to heal myself, or my progress is glacially slow.

I am hoping my new understanding about being a super rememberer will somehow help me feel less estranged from those I care about. I’m not the only one like this, even if I’m the only one in my immediate circle.

It’s also a reminder to get my memoir done while my memory is still so sharp!

Peace, Love, Grief

August 20, 2023 / Hermionejh

There have been better days lately. I’ve been doing my best to fill up the friend-shaped space she once occupied.

We don’t know what, if anything, awaits us after this world, so it’s a crapshoot if we’ll ever meet again. We won’t have eyes to see one another, mouths to talk and share a laugh, or arms to give a hug, but we will recognize each other if we retain consciousness outside our body.

I saw another old friend today that I haven’t seen in years. He was part of our large mutual friend group when we were teens, and I’m grateful he hasn’t radically changed since then. Matured, yes, but still true to his essential self.

After we parted I was hit with a wave of loneliness or sadness that seemed outsized for the situation, but later realized that it was about belonging – and about loss, because my friend who died in May also belonged in our friend group.

It’s kind of silly that I wanted to cling to him emotionally, as if his presence would resurrect our friend, but she’s gone, and no one can bring her back.

We both had places to be, so we left, and I walked myself through the mental patch of grief left in his wake that he really had nothing to do with.

The starkness of grief can trigger my leftover childhood neglect trauma. It feels like standing alone in the midst of a crowd.

My inner peace comes from the center of my heart, because I have no peace without love, but it’s very hard to find the love without peace. Thankfully, it’s still possible, even if it’s only moments.

I’m still in my life. I have things to do and places to go. It’s ok to still be here. It will also be ok when I’m no longer here.

I wondered earlier today if the experiences we have and the knowledge we gain are not ours alone, but are directly feeding or enriching the spirit world.

It might be that that is not how any of this works, but it made me feel like I’m possibly contributing something worthwhile to the whole.

Who knows?

Good Grief

July 26, 2023 / Hermionejh / 2 Comments

Time has been a strange concept for me. Sometimes I feel like my life has been one long day, and other times it feels like I’ve lived several lives since I was born.

I have clung to people in my past that didn’t cling back, even though we seemed so close at the time. I am lucky to still have a few people in my life that have been my friends through a lot if not most of the journey so far.

I try practicing the Buddhist idea of non-attachment, and try as I might, I still have attachments. I have put time, love and energy into people who seemed to feel the same, but have detached, or our connection didn’t mean to them what it meant to me.

We change. Our desires or our focus shifts and we either fall into, or choose, new groups of friends or acquaintances that give us more of what we’re looking for, maybe?

It’s about acceptance too. I keep hearing the lyric: “If you can’t be with the one you love, honey, love the one you’re with,” from Love The One You’re With by Stephen Stills.

I naively assumed that the people that were with me then experienced our connection the same way – that it mattered as much to them as it did to me.

It’s not bad or good, it just is. The challenge is to accept that. It’s not like I hadn’t been living my life anyway, but I have to incorporate it differently in my mind, and not interpret it like there is something wrong with me. There is nothing wrong with me – or at least nothing that the right pharmaceutical can’t dampen. (Kidding – sort of). I’m still waiting to get into a therapeutic psychedelics treatment.

Honestly, losing my mother, one of my best friends, and two other very good friends in the space of three years has been really hard. I miss my mom so much lately. It’s more the idea of her, I think – like my longing for someone to make my pain less raw. It’s more archetypal than actual because my mother wouldn’t have won any parenting awards. I think I did better, but guaranteed I still fucked up my kid no matter how hard I tried not to.

This has felt so convoluted, but it’s not, it’s grief. Grief is weird and distorting. It feels never ending and frightening to me – like if I feel it deeply I will dive into the darkness and never resurface – but that’s just not true.

Amnesia seems like it would be an ideal solution, but that would just cause other problems. Balance will return, but it will take a lot longer if I keep stuffing this grief under every internal couch cushion I can find, or shoving it way into my psyche’s back closet.

Wheat and Chaff

July 8, 2023July 10, 2023 / Hermionejh / 4 Comments

I think she’s insulating me from too much pain. While she lived, she was such a comfort through my grief after my mom died in January, 2020 – a month or so before the world was thrown into the Covid-19 pandemic.

My friend sent me a video of the Pretender’s I’ll Sta nd By You, and Cyndi Lauper’s True Colors, when the fall-out from my mom’s death was happening with my sisters, while my younger brother was spiraling from schizophrenia, in and out of hospitals. I was trying so hard to help keep him alive, and I soon realized that I couldn’t (and cannot) save him. I can only love him and hope that he is getting what he needs.

Just three years after my mother died, she died. And now another friend from my youth is slipping away from cancer too. I have had three friends, and likely soon, a fourth, die from cancer in three years. Is cancer more prevalent now? It seems so.

We could and did talk about everything, and she accepted me as I was, and I, her. I feel sad for people who don’t have that person in their life. That person who knows all about you and likes you anyway. That person who answers the phone at 3 a.m., and stays on the line for as long as you need.

We could be who we were, wheat and chaff, and we had so much laughter and fun too.

She was one of the smartest people I knew. She had such a depth of understanding and a thirst to know. about. e v e r y t h i n g.

I have many people in my life who are dear to me. I met them at high points and at low points, and I am grateful for their presence in my life – even if I couldn’t fulfill what they thought I could do if only I’d try more.

I wanted to, is all I can say. I don’t understand why my brain works the way it does, but my therapist tells me all the time that deep trauma and depression is the hardest condition to treat. It just is. It’s like a virus that morphs when you treat one aspect, only to present itself another way.

Having had so many wonderful healers in my life has been a greater bounty than I could ever repay, and I hope each and every one of them know that I love them, and how important they were. I hope I gave them a sense of love and gratitude that they felt.

I hope my friend is singing among the stars now, or I hope that she is doing whatever it is that matters to her. She’s probably just energy now, but there was an essence that was her spirit or soul, or whatever, while on earth, and I think that is what defines us here, and is what we leave with.

I sense her smiling, and waiting for me. She told me she’d be there to meet me when it’s my time to go. It’s not mine to know when this life will be done, but I still have things that are important to me to do.

Don’t wait to do them, she whispers. Don’t wait.

Messages To The Future

January 17, 2023February 22, 2023 / Hermionejh / 3 Comments

Maybe so much of my depression has been because of all the false starts, or half-hearted attempts at completing creative projects. I hear my therapy sessions whispering that my procrastination was and is not laziness. (It’s the PTSD, stupid. It’s the trauma.)

I know the best way out is through, but how long is through? An entire lifetime? I feel like I’m missing out on life’s best moments while hitting all of life’s pitfalls. I guess I need to carry a ladder – but ladders are cumbersome aren’t they?

I know some would just say to avoid the pitfalls, but, for me, that’s like saying “just stop breathing.” So, until I figure out how to no longer need a ladder up and out of these setbacks, I will continue working on a lightweight, fold-able, unobtrusive ladder that works for me.

“Works for me” is the key phrase – for all of us. Maybe what I do is the absolute opposite of what you should do. Maybe the ladder you built, or found, or have always had and used with ease is not attainable for me. Maybe all the guru spewing, consciousness-raising, ego-deflating advice isn’t helpful.

The best I can say is that I hope I find what is important to a more creative life and way less struggle – but I’ll keep championing myself, and us, in the collective struggle, and challenges, and also revel in our victories.

On my doctor’s wall is a framed statement by Brené Brown:

What we don’t need in the midst of struggle is shame for being human.

She also has a sticker on her laptop that says “I love drug users,” so she’s a pretty cool doc. She’s working to address the opioid crisis, while acknowledging that the war on drugs has been a big fail.

The opposite of addiction is connection. Sometimes it’s connection to ourselves most of all.

The ability to choose something different, to hope – to persevere in spite of circumstances – takes self-love, and compassion. And it is creative, even if it’s the smallest speck of belief that I will rise, and that I will complete what’s important to me before my time comes.