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 …
Tag Archives: death
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 …
No funeral without laughter
Sunday Blog 152 – 15th September 2024 Perhaps you noticed there was no Sunday blog last week. It was half a conscious decision to pause, have a minute’s, or rather a week’s silence. The other half was the exhaustion of washing up on the Sunday between my mother’s death and her funeral, with the clock …
Goodbye darling Mum
Sunday Blog 151 – 1 September 2024 Almost to the very end of her long life, my mother, Bet, remained who she was, of sound mind. Funny, spunky, unpredictable. In the emergency department last week where she was being treated for her broken hip, she was next to a man who had imbibed a little …