If you’re not alive, is it still your birthday?

Sunday Blog 204 – 12th October 2025 Asking for a friend. Or my dear departed dad I suppose. Not that he was particularly interested in birthdays while he was alive. Let’s say it wasn’t part of his family culture. He was one of eleven children in a family with few extra resources for birthday treats. …

Meditations on deathiversaries, Irish twins and headstones

Sunday Blog 203 – 5th October 2025 It’s Dad’s five year deathiversary, and I think enough time has passed to tell this story. It wasn’t until two weeks before his death that I even knew there was a three-for-one grave at Fremantle cemetery that Dad had purchased back in 2003 or thereabouts for his brother …

Letting the sorrow ripen

Sunday Blog 198 – 17th August 2025 This week I’ve been to Melbourne for a two-day meeting which I had intrepidly volunteered to co-chair, then I played catch-up with other work and volunteering commitments and worked on my final assignment for my first unit of a creative writing graduate certificate. As I’ve been focusing on …

More on yes and no

Sunday Blog 193 – 13th July 2025 What’s got my attention this week was an interview with Atul Gawande, one of my favourite clinician authors. Take, for example the first lines of the introduction his book, Being Mortal; I learned about a lot of things in medical school, but mortality wasn’t one of them. I …

No makes Way for Yes Part Two

Sunday Blog 178 – 30th March 2025 I have a card with the saying No Makes Way for Yes on my noticeboard in the hope it will enchant me to say no more often. It’s been there so long it’s yellowing around the edges. In 2019 I wrote a blog with the same title – …

One more selfie

Sunday Blog 164 – 22nd December 2024 “I’ll go if you go,” we’d both said. The Christmas party at my mother’s residential aged care home was like all the events. Kindly meant, organised with care. Riven to the core with loss on the part of the residents, anticipatory grief on the part of the families …

Every night I dream of India

Sunday Blog 159 – 17th November 2024 It’s been a bumpy, busy old two weeks since I returned from Rishikesh. And almost every one of those 14 nights, I’ve dreamed of India. Unusually active dreams with colours, sounds, sights of India. And lots of animals. Because I’ve been dreaming of India, does that mean I’ve …

Travel pastiches and grief journeys

Sunday Blog 157- 27th October 2024 At the conclusion of last Sunday’s blog, I was marooned in the limbo of a Heathrow airport hotel. Before I move on, let me linger on my six-day stay in London. Very rusty on London landmarks, I caught sight of an enormous statue when walking through Kensington Gardens. For …

Travelling shrine

Sunday Blog 154 – 30 Sep 2024 Graduation photo From the night before she died, I started making shrines for my mother. It began with a candle and a photo nestled alongside the fragrant bouquets I’d received from kind friends and family. I burned candles all night long, without stopping, in the days between her …

Early steps on the valedictory tour

Sunday Blog 153 – 22nd September 2024 One of the absolute wonders of travel to me is that I can be me, but somewhere far from home, if I just travel enough miles. And since Wednesday, I’ve travelled 17,000 kms/ 10,563 miles. The I, the Me that is housed in my body can find itself …