All That's Still Here

Coming back to say hello after a longer-than-expected pause.

There’s been lots of hanging out with the monarchs this past year.

The last thing I published here was on Jan 29th, 2025, titled: Constructing a Worthwhile Existence in 2025: how I hope to move forward after a destabilizing start to the year. Some hours after I published that post, at 4am on Jan 30th, my dad called to tell me that my mom had just been taken to the hospital via ambulance and that my sister and I should make our way there. At the time it was unclear what her exact diagnosis was, she’d been living with a spinal cord injury for almost 24 years at that point, and with that came a process of aging that was often misunderstood by medical doctors. What we knew was that my mom’s body was shutting down and it had been for some time, what I see now as a body dying, but holding on for dear life. Seeing in real time the body’s natural inclination to do whatever it can to keep surviving, sometimes at its own expense. I got almost six more months with her after that. She took her last breaths on 7/11/25, at home, with her favorite candle burning, a playlist we’d all compiled playing, surrounded by the people who loved her most.

When I look back on my last post, I feel a lot of tenderness for all that I didn’t know, all that was about to come. And I also feel tenderness for the part of me that had been bracing for the physical loss of my mom for a very long time, and all the feelings that come up around grieving someone before they are gone. It all takes my breath away a little bit. There’s one comment on that last post and it’s from my mom. There were limits to how she was able to show up over these last few years, but not a day went by that I didn’t know how proud she was to be my mom.

As a practitioner who holds space and provides care for people navigating difficult things, I’m continually navigating the balance between self-disclosure and self-containment. This platform is not the same space as my treatment room, but it is a window into a part of me I sometimes feel hesitant to share publicly. Death and grief take up a lot of space in a room, there’s no way around that. And as I keep writing here, parts of my process with grief will naturally show up.

I want to name this for anyone who follows this newsletter and also spends time on my table. I have a strong personal and professional support system that I lean on. I am being tended to so that I can tend to others, among other reasons too of course. My mom’s death is now another thing that informs my work, which from a relational perspective, I really hold with honor. I don’t know who said this, but I read somewhere that death is the great equalizer. It will come to all of us at some point, and until then we will all experience profound loss.

Even in the emptiness, I keep finding traces of what’s still here. My mom’s comment on my last post, the quiet ways her love lingers, the flowers that keep blooming, the seasons that keep changing, the people who keep showing up, the work that continues to feel meaningful, and the way spaces like this always wait for me until I’m ready to return.

It’s not intentional that this post is going out a year to the day that my last one did. But it’s probably also not a coincidence. I wrote this months ago, and like I often do with things like this, I have been sitting on it awaiting the day or moment that I’d say ok, I’m ready. Sometimes that day comes and sometimes it doesn’t, but here you are reading this. Maybe it’s one last tiny layer from the year of the wood snake before the year of the fire horse takes over.

I’m happy to be back here. Who knows what it will look like, but consider this my check-in to tell you all hello and that I’m making my way back to sharing on this platform.

See you soon. xo