Dear Ones,

Sharing this letter in hopes it can be an avenue of comfort and strength for you as you deal with your own loses.  Dad’s trumpeting is saying to me “share it!  Share it!  Share it!”

LOVE, Dona

Dear Linda,
a year ago today!  While opening take-out from Three Brothers in Lake Park over-looking Lake Michigan, I opened the text that informed Tom, Rosa and me of your death.  That day a monarch made huge figure eights around us for twenty minutes.  Today, I’m feeling a fresh pain of the deep hole!  I’m again looking for comfort from nature and what a blessing I had this week.

While driving and listening to Public Radio I heard Edith Widder Smith* talk about submerging into the depths of the ocean in dark capsules and discovering incredibly breathtaking bioluminescence. What a wonderful reminder of how you gained equanimity**. You learned to live with loss-pain darkness and still delight in a wild variety of light displays. You helped the rest of us learn to hold it all at once, you helped us to do that in our own unique ways.   Linda, you led us out on forays of metaphors to reveal this mystery called life.

And more.  A further walk today revealed dewdrops catching the sun like tiny wildly-flung ubiquitous rainbow crystals! They were radiant even in the shade!  Is it your “No amount of dark can keep the light from getting through!?!?” After your daughter’s death, you asked Joanna for a sign and out of a gray-blanketed sky she gave you a double rainbow.   Dear Linda, even a year later, like you did, we continue to have days when we have to grab on to hand rails, pull ourselves on energy-less legs up the stairs and gaze longingly out the window. Thanks for the grace you help send.

Until I join you, LOVE….. Dona

* Edith Widder has you tubes and new memoir Below the Edge of Darkness

**listening to Krista Tippett interview Pastor Jen Baily: “What we Inherit and What we Send Forth”, I heard reflections on equanimity.  I’d pulled under a cell tower so I could hear the end of the exchange and at this point, although as hard as I looked, I could not see it, Dad’s crane trumpeted above me.  The siege of cranes that trumpeted over his open gravesite 14 years ago still sends offspring my way.